Press

• Bartok: Bluebeard's Castle

  Recording

  May 2025

  • Karina Canellakis conducts the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic as if her life depended on it, understanding the aching angularity of Bartok's score and exploring every musical shiver and chordal creak. Climaxes are perfectly places and there's an admirable attention to detail - the anxious ostinato for strings in the Prologue and the unsettling drum beat that heralds the opening of the Sixth Door. Chilling.

    • BBC Music Magazine
    • 15 May 2025

  • I love the attention to detail that Canellakis brings, her obvious relish of the vivid scoring. I was unsettled by the frenzied woodwind and percussion in the torture chamber, enraptured by the harp in the treasure room and transported to a suitably pastoral frame of mind by the beautifully combined flute and horn in the garden...Overall this is a compelling version of Bartok's dark masterpiece. It is not perfect, but it is hugely satisfying musically and dramatically.

    • Musicweb International
    • 12 May 2025

• New York Philharmonic

  David Geffen Hall, NY

  Feb 2025

  • Throughout the concert, she elicited playing of poise and patience, inspiring the ensemble to relax into phrases - which gave the music more organic energy than pressing relentlessly forward would have...her programme was ambitious, and it had unusual coherence, this was a sustained exploration of musical modernism...

    • New York Times
    • 14 February 2025

  • ...a marvelous evening of intensely spiritual modern and post-modern music, lovingly shaped by the New York-born conductor, who was returning to the Philharmonic after a memorable debut...The orchestral sound shimmered and undulated like the aurora borealis...

    • New York Classical Review
    • 14 February 2025

• London Philharmonic Orchestra, Bruckner Symphony no.4

  Royal Festival Hall London

  Oct 2024

  • There was no shortage of fire in Bruckner's Symphony No. 4 in which the glorious sounds of the LPO's brass players glowed like a golden sunrise...Canellakis was an unerring guide to a symphony filled with the sounds of the natural world, which here also felt like a spiritual journey through the forest, a place of solace, solitude and awe.

    • The Times
    • 31 October 2024

• New York Philharmonic debut

  David Geffen Hall, New York

  Apr 2024

  • With the Philharmonic, Canellakis made an exciting and memorable debut, in a program that leaned heavily toward meditative, dreamy reflection. She began with an incisive reading of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, keeping her conducting elegantly restrained, even economized — gestures that befitted this sharply angled, brief set. Where the Webern was spare, the next piece, Strauss’s mystic “Death and Transfiguration,” was sumptuous, with Canellakis and the orchestra rendering phrases in richly hued colors and gentle curves. She harnessed the ensemble’s full power, riding over the heaving waves of sound with a muscular confidence.

    • New York Times
    • 05 April 2024

• London Philharmonic Orchestra, Shostakovich Symphony no. 8

  Royal Festival Hall, London

  Oct 2023

  • Canellakis made sure that this wartime symphony had trenchant power and a palpable sense of the overwhelming forces that crush individual freedoms.

    • Financial Times
    • 30 October 2023

• Bartok Concerto for Orchestra

  recording

  Jun 2023

  • Canellakis projects the slow 'Preludio', 'Intermezzo' and 'Marcia Funebre' movements with full-blooded passion, securing a wonderfully warm string tone from her orchestra, and unleashes tremendous energy and ferocity in the 'Scherzo'... The great virtue of this performance, however, is that Canellakis places more emphasis on the work's shadowy and anguished resonances rather than focussing on its propensity towards extrovert virtuoso display.

    • BBC Music Magazine
    • 01 June 2023

  • Karina Canellakis (who wrote the detailed - and impassioned - booklet notes) clearly relates to the ethos of these pieces and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra (impressively engineered by the Pentatone team) paint the soundscape with both finesse and fire.

    • Gramophone Magazine
    • 01 June 2023

• Strauss: Ein Heldenleben

  Chicago Symphony Orchestra

  May 2022

  • Canellakis also sees to it that brief moments of tranquility seamlessly cede to moments of lush romanticism, to a thrilling, frenzied air of turmoil created by furiously bowed strings and powerful horns, to a sustained silence, and then to the almost dreamy sleep in the wake of a storm. The contrasting moods of peaceful, lyrical beauty and ferocious bursts of rage are impeccably captured from first note to last. Bravo to both this remarkable orchestra and an outstanding conductor.

    • Window to the World
    • 21 May 2022

• Scriabin: Symphony no. 4, The Poem of Ecstasy

  Royal Festival Hall, London Philharmonic Orchestra

  Jan 2022

  • The chemistry of conductor and orchestra seemed well-nigh perfect: often Canellakis encompassed the sound, rounding her elbows and opening her arms, and the music flung itself into them. Canellakis achieved exactly the right balance between controlling the constellations in this luminous night sky of sound and maintaining a collegial presence, her players responding to her with gusto that was suitably ecstatic…Above all, the LPO has a real treasure in Canellakis

    • The Arts Desk
    • 24 January 2022

• Tchaikovsky Symphony no. 4

  Roayl Festival Hall, London Philharmonic Orchestra

  Jan 2022

  • An urgent energy swept us through the slow movement, but with enough bloom to provide emotional release, Canellakis letting the bittersweet mood gradually dissolve like melted snow. There was a freshly minted quality to the puckish fast movement…There is explosive chemistry between this conductor and orchestra.

    • The Times
    • 22 January 2022

  • Throughout there was precision but not at the cost of tension, so that the feeling of release at the symphony’s final climax was overpowering. Canellakis and the LPO are an excellent team in the making.

    • The Evening Standard

• Eugen Onegin

  Théâtre des Champs Élysées

  Nov 2021

  • Cette nouvelle production fait donc figure d'événement, d'autant qu'elle est d'une qualité exceptionnelle. La jeune chef américaine Karina Canellakis dirige, avec toutes les nuances indispensables pour entendre l'œuvre, l'Orchestre national de France

    • Le Figaro
    • 21 November 2021

  • De la fosse, la cheffe Karina Cannelakis fait monter la musique vibrante, enveloppante, enivrante de Tchaïkovsky. Elle tient notre très bel Orchestre National d’une main souple et forte... On sent qu’elle a son Tchaïkovksy à fleur de peau. Et le frisson passe dans la salle

    • Forumopera.com
    • 25 November 2021

  • la direction de Karina Canellakis est passionnelle à souhait, naviguant avec une évidente jubilation entre sombre fièvre, rythmes haletants et déroulé paisible des séquences mélancoliques – donnant à entendre, en tout cas, toutes les subtilités d’une partition riche de nuances.

    • Web Theatre
    • 21 November 2021

• London Symphony Orchestra

  Barbican Centre

  Mar 2020

  • Karina Canellakis, making her conducting debut with the LSO, gave us beautifully fluent accounts of Strauss's 1946 Symphonic Fantasy on his 1919 opera Die Frau ohne Schatten and early tone poem Death and Transfiguration (1889), and of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major and "choreographic poem" La valse.'

    • The Sunday Times
    • 22 March 2020