Lise Davidsen: Live at the Met Lise Davidsen (soprano) James Baillieu (piano) (Decca) Image This really is Lise Davidsen’s moment. At the time of writing, the singer often described “greatest dramatic soprano in the world” has just performed the opening night of a run of performances at the Metropolitan Opera as Isolde. She made her house debut in 2019 (as Lisa in The Queen of Spades) and has been frequently welcomed back: this is her ninth different role in a house which she is starting to call it her second home. The current production of Read more ...

The master pianist and pedagogue Heinrich Neuhaus impressed upon Elisabeth Leonskaja the maxim "don't look for yourself in the music, but find the music in you", something she says she reflects upon daily. Which is how she seems to channel the essence, shedding ego but retaining personality. More recently she's given us one-composer marathons - Beethoven's and Schubert's last three sonatas above all - so to be reminded of what genius there is in her more diverse programming was a special pleasure in last night's recital of Beethoven, Schoenberg, Chopin, Webern, Schubert and Mozart. The Read more ...

My last St John Passion arrived during the Proms in the vast hanger of the Royal Albert Hall, where the impeccable, discreet musicianship of Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan sometimes struggled with the chilly open spaces all around. At St Martin-in-the-Fields yesterday evening, no such problems: the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, with Peter Whelan directing, balanced intimacy and grandeur in a reading whose visceral impact and involving immediacy wholly filled the church, while never overwhelming it. Vocally and instrumentally, the Monteverdi singers and EBS Read more ...

To watch Martin Hayes play the Irish fiddle is like watching a man possessed by his music. As his bow flickers across the strings the infectious energy of it spills into the air, through his limbs, and eventually out into the whistling, whooping crowd. Through the course of his career, Hayes – most famous for founding the Irish-American supergroup The Gloaming – has joined forces with musicians ranging from Paul Simon to Yo-Yo Ma, and played everywhere from small pubs to Obama’s Whitehouse. At Koko last night, with his ensemble The Common Ground, his virtuoso repertoire of Irish Read more ...

If there was love in the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s Valentine’s concert, then it was very much of the doomed variety. There was Romeo and Juliet, of course, as imagined in Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy Overture, and Zemlinsky’s marvellously strange take on The Little Mermaid. Zemlinsky’s Mermaid disappeared for decades until it was reconstructed in the 1980s, and that long absence might go some way towards explaining why it’s such a rarity in concert halls today. We audiences are the losers in that, though, because this 45-minute orchestral fantasy is a cascade of colours in which the Read more ...

Pretty much any performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony is a special occasion, but this one perhaps more so than most. For one thing, it was a landmark event in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s 90th anniversary year - the only concert this season that saw the return of Sir Donald Runnicles, their Conductor Emeritus. Runnicles’ Mahler performances were always highlights during his time in charge of the orchestra, and this is a special work for him, not only one of the pieces that persuaded him to become a conductor, but also one in which he sang as a young member of the Read more ...

Almost everything about Piotr Anderszewski's Wigmore Hall recital pleased, intrigued and even thrilled – except, perhaps, the order of the works. The Polish-born pianist opened with his selection of a dozen of Brahms’s late solo pieces, from the Op. 116 to 119 sets, and returned after the interval with the thunderous heavy cavalry of Beethoven’s final sonata, Op. 111. Compare, and contrast, the supreme leave-takings of both poets of the piano.Now, Anderszewski’s arrangement and performance of the Brahms works – several of them far from “miniatures” – lends them a dramatic and architectural Read more ...

The BBC NOW called this concert Echoes of France, which was both an understatement and a partial misnomer. Cardiff’s St David’s Hall being currently out of action, the orchestra is playing its regular concerts in the much smaller Hoddinott Hall, but with no concession to the acoustical trivia of decibels, balance and blend. Misnomer? We heard Ravel and Chausson - French certainly - but Sibelius’s Pelleas and Melisande incidental music is French only in the language of the play, which is by the Belgian Maeterlinck. It’s strange how that play captivated composers on either side of the year Read more ...

 An English Violin Geneviève Laurenceau (violin), Orchestre de Picardie/David Niemann, with Jean-Frédéric Neuburg (piano) (NoMadMusic)  Image An English Violin, from French violinist Geneviève Laurenceau, consists of a superb and thoroughly recommendable new recording of the violin concerto from 1935 by English composer Guirne Creith (born Gladys Mary Cohen, 1907-1996), and a beautifully played selection of pieces for violin and piano: Elgar from the late Victorian era, Rebecca Clarke from the 1920s, right through to Walton Read more ...

Famously Handel and Bach never met, despite being born in the same year in the same country. So it was fun to see the programme for the English Concert’s delightful, vivacious performance in St George's Hanover Square playfully pit the two composers against each other by presenting works that they both composed in their thirties.When he wrote his Chandos Anthems, the still relatively fresh-faced Handel was working for the fiercely ambitious James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, who established a chamber ensemble that became known as the Cannons Concert at his estate in Middlesex. Though there Read more ...

Last week I saw Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a play which behind its pyrotechnic wit affirms that sorrow and calamity can strike chaotically at the heart of any human idyll. At first glance, the programme presented at Kings Place by the ever-resourceful Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, with Vermont-born folk singer-songwriter Sam Amidon and a quartet from the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, looked rich in time-honoured pastoral pleasures. The launch concert for Kuusisto and Amidon’s new album Willows, on the Platoon label, it featured a string quartet arrangement (by Martin Gerigk) of Vaughan Read more ...

Valentine’s Day was only a week gone when the BBC Philharmonic gave us a programme on the theme of love. And the most haunting memory of it all was the gentle, song-inspired and highly original Viola Concerto by Cassandra Miller. It’s subtitled "I cannot love without trembling" and was played by this orchestra at the Proms under John Storgårds on 31 July 2024, by all accounts leaving everyone mesmerized. This time it was conducted by Ludovic Morlot, the orchestra’s Associate Artist, and again the soloist was Lawrence Power, who commissioned it (through his Viola Commissioning Circle, along Read more ...