Berlioz's intended companion for his Symphonie fantastique was Lélio, or the Return to Life - an assemblage of mostly magical earlier pieces strung together with an autobiographical narration. That's a rarity these days, but so is an all-Berlioz programme with a more familiar work to preface the iconoclastic Symphonie, and we should be grateful to Simon Rattle with a much-expanded Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment for such an imaginative choice.The concept, it seems, was for a gauzy, dreamy take on a less fantastical slice of autobiography, Harold in Italy - which despite its Byronic nod Read more ...

This beguiling “semi-staged” performance of Mahler’s First Symphony is the latest attempt in a growing movement to interrogate the relationship between classical music performers and their audiences. It’s strongly reminiscent of the point when theatre directors were ripping up the rulebook in the Nineties, whether they were staging their works in site-specific locations, plunging audiences into complete darkness, or subverting expectations with new uses of video projection and puppetry.Inevitably there were misses as well as hits, but thirty years on, there’s no doubt that the theatre scene Read more ...

Range, I decided on Monday night, was what makes for great performances: range of emotions, dynamics, pitches. It was as true of Abel Selaocoe and his fine fellow musicians (★★★★★) as it had been of the Belcea Quartet with Tabea Zimmermann at the Wigmore Hall last week. The Wigmore also welcomed this team on Friday, and you can be sure that the programme and approach were different; you could also add to the various ranges the gamut from timeless improvisation to the tightest of shared rhythms. Those of us who've followed Selaocoe's progress for some years now know there are regular Read more ...

Danish by name, and very much Danish by appearance (the cellist is Norwegian, but we’ll let that go). This quartet combines a glorious selection of blonde beards and moustaches and eyelashes and floppy fringes with playing that is joyful and life-affirming, both in the sound the players produce, and the evident joy they have in playing together. This was my first time hearing the Danish Quartet, but I am determined it won’t be the last.They played three pieces, starting with Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne, an arrangement of an arrangement of an arrangement. It’s based on Stravinsky’s ballet Read more ...

Carl Nielsen: The Ultimate Solo Piano Collection Rikke Sandberg (OUR Recordings) Image Good compilations of Nielsen’s piano music are available: I like Leif Ove Andsnes’ single disc collection, and Martin Roscoe’s excellent Hyperion double album presents what was previously thought to be the composer’s complete keyboard output. But Danish pianist Rikke Sandberg’s new box has three well-filled discs and really does contain everything, some of the new material made up of recently discovered piano transcriptions of orchestral pieces. If you’re Read more ...

Richard Strauss, who conducted this orchestra and programme to an audience of 7000 in the Royal Albert Hall on 19 October 1947 aged 83, would have shared our mixed feelings about the curious phenomenon that is Santtu-Matias Rouvali, the now-80-year-old Philharmonia's Principal Conductor. Not for Strauss Santtu's expansive, sometimes sluggish approach to his most popular symphonic-poem calling card, Don Juan. And in the 1940s he was quicker, too, with his mostly tongue-in-cheek, brilliantly worked saga of 24 hours in the life of the Strauss family, Symphonia Domestica. But he would have Read more ...

If the Wigmore Hall sought perfection in its 125th Anniversary Festival, it found it in the two concerts I've attended this week - in the greater part of Lise Davidsen's and James Baillieu's Schubert cornucopia, and last night in the sublime Belcea Quartet's teaming up with similarly legendary viola player Tabea Zimmermann in two awe-inspiring string quintet masterpieces. Zimmermann held centre place in Mozart's G minor Quintet, telling from the start because Mozart has the first viola as the lower of the top three voices at the start, only to take the upper line with second viola and Read more ...

It's nine years since soprano Lise Davidsen gave a Wigmore Hall audience her first credentials as a recitalist, in true partnership with a pianist to whom she's remained faithful since, James Baillieu. Alexandra Coghlan welcomed her then, and while I'd been bowled over by her role in Pappano's Royal Opera Verdi Requiem and was stunned by her Sibelius Luonnotar, I had some questions about the first half of her Barbican recital. Any here were purely a matter of taste; her Schubert programme with Baillieu was finely shaped in every respect. You couldn't fail to love her by the end.Suffering Read more ...

Yesterday I travelled through a sweltering London in shorts and sandals to go and hear Schubert’s Winterreise, about a bleak journey through a frozen landscape. It was quite the disjuncture, and a strange piece of seasonal programming. But I was glad to hear veteran baritone Thomas Hampson in fine voice in the Schubert, accompanied by Latvian accordionist Ksenija Sidorova, even if the second half of Kurt Weill and Astor Piazzolla was less fulfilling.Singers eschewing the traditional pianist for the more unusual (in the classical concert hall) sounds of the accordion is all the rage at the Read more ...

Kahchun Wong ended his second season as the Hallé’s principal conductor with a blockbuster – and one from what may be seen as his personal zone of expertise: Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.Blockbuster in the sense that it’s a huge undertaking logistically, with a very large orchestra required, and that it’s a very big work. Blockbuster also almost literally – the finale requires an enormous Thor-like hammer to be wielded, at least twice, to create a thud akin to that of an axe at the base of a tree.Should it be three thumps, or just two? Mahler changed his mind about that, and editors and Read more ...

Bach: Goldberg Variations BWV 988 Asya Fateyeva (soprano/alto saxophones), Eckart Runge (cello) Andreas Borregaard (accordion) (Berlin Classics) Image Bach’s “Keyboard exercise consisting of an aria with several variations for a two-manual harpsichord” from 1741 maintains its fascination, keeps on filling gaps and finding welcoming new places. Dmitry Sitkovetsky's string trio version (‘in memoriam Glenn Gould’) has become a staple of the repertoire. Wendy Carlos was the first of many musicians who might have been tempted to confess: “Forgive Read more ...

So polished and passionate are the 11 world-class players of Ensemble 360, pioneering music in the round in Sheffield and elsewhere for the past 21 years, that you'd be grateful enough to hear them in wall-to-wall standard fare. But the Sheffield Chamber Music Festival has been about so much more, featuring special curator-performers - pianist Kathryn Stott and cellist Steven Isserlis in previous festivals I was fortunate to attend, this year soprano Claire Booth - and working with top-class folk from other disciplines. This year's triple bill of Samuel Beckett, Morton Feldman and the two Read more ...