Accolades first for the deep sound in Strauss of The Met Orchestra, newcomers to the Proms, under its Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has been in the Albert Hall ring many times, and for the flamethrowing Salome of Elza van den Heever. Only days ago I lamented not catching the finer nuances of mezzo Jamie Barton in Das Lied von der Erde from the side; sitting closer to the back of the hall, it was amazing to hear the phenomenon of a rich, full voice serving a detailed dramatic characterisation, something we never give up hope for in a capricious colosseum.Disappointment in the choice Read more ...

Last year, Chineke! delivered one of the Proms’ more hard-hitting offerings, in a programme including Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, “50 minutes of brutality, despair and terror”, and Valerie Colman’s Fanfare for Uncommon Times, reflecting on the COVID pandemic and social upheaval. This year, by contrast, they blended nostalgia with unfettered escapism, mixing Dvořák’s uncharacteristically cheerful Symphony No. 8 in G major with the glitz and glamour of songs including Gershwin’s "Love Is Here to Stay" and Irving Berlin’s "Puttin’ on the Ritz".  Conductor and Chineke! Interim Artistic Read more ...

At this year’s Aldeburgh Festival, I watched Lise Davidsen take a young singer through Mahler’s “Liebst du um Schönheit” in a riveting public masterclass. Go big on feeling and meaning, urged the great Norwegian operatic soprano, but drop the beefy “opera” voice. Impeccable advice, of course, but how does a singer of Mahler’s five achingly personal Rückert-Lieder project inwardness and intimacy across the Royal Albert Hall? Especially when, as with Joyce DiDonato last night, behind her sits The Met Orchestra, released from its New York pit to unleash its gloriously blended sound – Read more ...

Interspersal programmes – or “mind melds”, as I like to call them – can sometimes open up new vistas of listening and sometimes be tokenistic piffle. Happily, Monday morning’s EIF programme from the Gringolts Quartet (pictured below by Tomasz Trzebiatowski) was the first of those, mostly. Their idea was to take the four movements of Schubert’s final string quartet and to intersperse them with three pieces for string quartet by György Kurtág, the objective being, in Ilya Gringolts’ words, to bring Kurtág’s lyricism to the fore. The EIF isn’t doing much to commemorate Kurtág’s centenary Read more ...

Where the US President chose to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of his country with a cage fight, the BBC stuck to music in this Prom of 20th century Americana. Featuring Marin Alsop and the Philharmonia, it ticked lots of boxes – but slightly fell over itself in the process.The box-ticking included the programming of a woman – Joan Tower – but only for a three-minute piece, her first Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman. Its title is striking, but only draws attention to the fact the music is no more than a pale shadow of the Copland original, albeit with the Philharmonia brass and Read more ...

There can be few more cultivated ways to spend a morning than with the chamber music of Francis Poulenc. The Gallic wit that’s so evident in his larger scale work is even more prominent in his music for the salon, where an arch smile or a sly wink seems to accompany almost every phrase. The wind soloists of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra understood this well in their Friday recital at the Queen’s Hall (★★★★★), the elegance and wit dialled up even further by the fact that these musicians play with one another all the time and know each other well. That meant that André Cebrián could bring Read more ...

In a moving short programme interview, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra's Principal Guest Conductor Anja Bihlmaier sums up the essence of her miraculous way with Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth): "I find it is both a work about saying farewell and a celebration of being fully present in the moment." The orchestral musicians were unforgettably present in the rainbow of moods and moments, as was tenor Clay Hilley. Mezzo Jamie Barton, the promised star of the evening, was harder to catch, though that may have been something to do with hearing her from the side. The Read more ...

It has taken until halfway through this year’s Edinburgh International Festival before we got to the first string quartet in the Queen’s Hall’s chamber music series, but when it came, the venue was packed to the gills. Maybe that’s the Sheku effect. Mr Kanneh-Mason (pictured below) was joining the Kleio Quartet to play one of the central pillars of the chamber music repertoire, Schubert’s String Quintet, so it’s hardly surprising that people came in their droves.  Image And it was worth it. This was the first time Kanneh-Mason had Read more ...

After a century of trail-blazing Black musicians across every genre, it’s dumbfounding to discover that clarinettist Anthony McGill is the first African-American principal in the New York Philharmonic. He did have distinguished predecessors in the orchestra: in 1962 the remarkable violinist Sanford Allen became its first permanent Black member, and stayed until 1977. Without diminishing McGill’s signal achievements, it would be reasonable to say that, half a century later, he has had a slightly smoother path to follow.  Image That path Read more ...

It's a reviewer's unkind luxury to moan about having to sit through yet another performance of Elgar's Cello Concerto simply to hear a rarer work; there will always be audience members, especially among the 5000 in the Royal Albert Hall, who'll never have heard the concerto live. Yet it's also a singular masterpiece, and last night Spanish cellist Pablo Ferrández plumbed its melancholy depths and keenly reflected Vasily Petrenko's nuanced Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at every point. This was the perfect link between more-than-curtain-raiser Webern and Walton's fascinating Second Symphony. Read more ...

The clue is in the name, I suppose. Revolución diamantina – Glitter revolution – was written in 2023 by Gabriela Ortiz (pictured below) as a response to violence against women in Mexico, inspired by mass movements where protesters threw glitter on the police. However, there is glitter in Ortiz’s music, too, and in many ways it’s the ballet score’s energising force. Tintinnabulating percussion, glittering piccolo, beautifully scored effects of light and, perhaps above all else, dashed clever use of the women of the Los Angeles Master Chorale: all of these effects combine with the score’s edgy Read more ...

So much has vanished from my memory of the time I had a half-season Arena Proms pass back in 1982, but not the performance of Berlioz's Requiem (Grande Messe des Morts) with the four brass bands placed at compass points of the Albert Hall, emulating the composer's original positionings in Saint-Louis des Invalides. I awaited the same with rather childish glee for Antonio Pappano's marshalling of a large orchestral and choral army. It was not to be: two of the bands were left and right, respectively above the women and the men of the combined London Symphony and BBC Symphony Choruses, the Read more ...