“This Prom was about Jonathon Heyward, NYOGB and Beethoven. …Heyward’s a man of twenty-nine coolly heading for the stratosphere,” writes Ateş Orga in Collins Column. “Economic in body language, he displays a wiry rhythmic tension in what he does, together with the clearest of beats. Gratuitous indulgence, excessive gesture, isn’t his scene. Crisp punctuation, grammatically underlined cadences, sharp dynamics, phrased hairpins, clean cut-offs are. Clarity, coaxing his musicians, getting everyone to listen yet have their say and freedom, openness and accessibility, knowing what it is to be given opportunity, determine his manner and aesthetic.
“An ‘Eroica’ to seize you by the throat. Bold vision, taut architecture, sweeping paragraphs, enough detail to speak and stimulate but not overcrowd or detract. …>
“One grew up on other kinds of ‘Eroica’ – Knappertsbusch, Klemperer, Karajan, Barbirolli, the weight of von Matačić, the ‘wedding cake’ monumentalism of Svetlanov. …Every now and again performances stop us in our tracks. I’ve written elsewhere about Kristjan Järvi’s seismic Baltic Youth Philharmonic ‘explosion’ in Paris in 2015. Then there was that phenomenal night with the Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra under Dudamel at the 2007 Proms. Jonathon Heyward opens a new page. A career-defining evening.”