Welcome to Stuart Stratford’s website
Stuart Stratford is the most impressive of Opera North’s recent guest conductors.
Andrew Clark, Financial Times
Under Stuart Stratford, the City of London Sinfonia plays with absolute engagement, relishing the febrile and furious lurches of this glorious, urgent tragedy. There are no weak links. Every characterisation is thorough, every note sung with meaning… Not simply the highlight of Holland Park’s season, this Kat’a Kabanova is the highlight of the summer.
Anna Picard, the Independent
..the musical performance matches the dramatic breadth and momentum of the staging. Stuart Stratford’s conducting of the City of London Sinfonia is inspirational, easily the most thrilling performance I have heard at Holland Park. It is viscerally exciting in the blood-and-thunder passages, but wonderfully nuanced, too. Overall, this is the hit of the Holland Park season, and perhaps the company’s best-ever show. Not to be missed.
Hugh Canning, The Times
The City of London Sinfonia…. under an efficient conductor, their playing is stylish, secure, and warmly blended. Under Stuart Stratford, it is utterly thrilling. Stratford’s Jenufa is powerfully argued: brutal, searing and caustic, meticulously accented, abrupt, yet softening into the sad, slow intimacy that is, as much as rage, the subject of this opera. We’ve been spoilt for good Janácek in the past few years, yet this is the first Jenufa I have heard that has had such a sharply defined Janus face, looking back to Dvorák and forward to Bartók.