The cellist and the pianist famously have a more competitive relationship in Brahms’ Cello Sonata in E minor than in many compositions for solo instrument and piano. Brahms composed it for the Viennese singing teacher and cellist Dr Joseph Gänsbacher – when, on first playthrough, Gänsbacher complained he couldn’t hear himself because of the piano part, Brahms bellowed back, “You’re lucky.”Yet in the packed lunchtime concert performed by American cellist Alisa Weilerstein and Siberian-born pianist Pavel Kolesnikov, there was no sense that either musician was bludgeoning their way into the Read more ...

There is nothing to compare with the visceral experience of hearing a massed choir – in this case the 230-strong combined forces of the Crouch End Festival Chorus and the Hertfordshire Chorus – in full-throated fortissimo. Add in a team of stellar soloists and an inspirational conductor and the result was a very enjoyable musical evening at the Royal Festival Hall. My only reservation was the piece itself, Elgar’s lesser-known oratorio The Kingdom, with which conductor David Temple “can find no fault” but by which I was less convinced.The same forces as in this concert performance recorded Read more ...

Image Stravinsky: Late Works Cappella Amsterdam, Nord Nederlands Orkest/Daniel Reuss (Pentatone)In 1952, his 70th year, Stravinsky had a compositional crisis. After completing his biggest piece – The Rake’s Progress – he felt unable to compose and didn’t know what to do. The route to a solution was laid out by Robert Craft, the young American conductor who had been helping Stravinsky with the English pronunciation of The Rake’s libretto. Craft led him to the serial music of the avant-garde – composers like Webern and Boulez – and this Read more ...

Any conductor undertaking a journey through Mahler's symphonies - and Vladimir Jurowski's with the London Philharmonic Orchestra has been among the deepest - needs to give us the composer's last thoughts, not just the first movement (which, along with the short "Purgatorio" at the centre of the symphony, was all that Mahler fully scored). Or so I thought every time I heard Deryck Cooke's restrained but not anaemic performing version. Last night I wished Jurowski had left it at the opening odyssey, as perfect as I've ever heard it, and not espoused fellow Russian Rudolf Barshai's "completion". Read more ...

Perhaps it was the thought of “Blue Monday”, which fell a week ago, that stimulated the choice of Lili Boulanger’s D’un soir triste as the opening piece of this concert. Certainly there can be few short pieces of music filled with such unremitting misery from start to finish.Anja Bihlmaier, the BBC Philharmonic’s principal guest conductor, is normally not one to wallow in lugubrious gloom – far from it. But she entered the spirit of music written by the tragic composer who died very young in 1918 and whose last work this was, completed not long before her demise in piano trio form. It was Read more ...

It was a pleasure to see conductor Duncan Ward back in Manchester. His Hallé debut was by no means his first time in the city – he trained at the University of Manchester and the Royal Northern College of Music and has conducted the BBC Philharmonic and Manchester Camerata in the past, and some may even remember him as a student with an orchestra he took to the Arndale shopping centre, making music in the malls, back in 2011.He was something of a Wunderkind then – pianist, organist and composer as well as budding conductor, a product of Mark Heron’s joint course at the two Manchester Read more ...

Every visit by Vladimir Jurowski, the London Philharmonic Orchestra's former Principal Conductor and now Conductor Emeritus, is unmissable, and this fascinating programme outdid expectations.  If there was any link with the LPO's "Harmony with Nature" season theme, it was ironic – discord being the keynote – but the concert was perfectly wrought.Jurowski balanced Mosolov's 1920s mini-thrash depicting an iron foundry with contemporary Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun's soundcape initially tied to an image of mining waste mountains in the Donbass (the composer pictured below by Konrad Read more ...

After the myriad intricacies and moodswings of Janáček's The Makropulos Case on Tuesday and Thursday - I was lucky to catch both performances, the second even more electrifying than the first - the London Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle seemed to be enjoying a relative holiday last night. They could leave the most fiendish element in Bartók's Second Violin Concerto to the astonishing Patricia Kopatchinskaja, delivering every aspect of a work that might have been written for her, and other poetic extremes to mezzo Rinat Shaham, before letting their hair down in Falla's complete ballet Read more ...

Marketed as “City Noir” to begin with, this programme title was switched to “Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 4” closer to the off, perhaps because the more familiar of the two main items in it would ring more bells with potential attenders. Unsurprisingly, it proved a thing of two halves, with Beethoven in the first, and John Adams’ self-described symphony inspired by Los Angeles, from 2009, in the second.The concerto was imaginatively preludised by another American composer’s evocative thoughts – Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, in John Storgårds’ first Bridgewater Hall programme with Read more ...

Director Bill Barclay’s new collaboration with the Gesualdo Six – commissioned by St Martin-In-The Fields for its 300th anniversary – brings an opulent intensity to its depiction of a man whose troubled existence was reflected in darkly ravishing music. Gesualdo’s life was in many ways the counterpoint to Christ’s – born into privilege, he allowed himself to be defined by lust and a murderous thirst for revenge. So it’s one of his many disturbing paradoxes that he identified so strongly with Jesus’s suffering. Part of the power of this production comes from the heretical frisson that in this Read more ...

Our most adventurous guitarist never does anything twice, at least not in quite the same form. Days after a recital in Dublin's Royal Irish Academy of Music, he included several items from that programme in a unique three-parter.It started with a selection of international lute dances from the Scottish Rowallen Manuscript – talking about them in between, as he apparently didn't in presumably a different Dublin selection – in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer, before leading us in to the Purcell Room for Bach and Adès on guitar, and then out for Part Three in a differently organised foyer, Read more ...

Anna Lapwood may not be the only virtuoso organist to celebrate the centenary of Joseph Jongen’s Symphonie concertante this year, but with her performance with the Hallé under Katharina Wincor she was almost certainly the first. It’s one of the most taxing – if only for the sheer stamina required of its soloist – and multi-faceted works for organ and orchestra ever written. Its four movements come in at around 35 minutes, concluding with a moto perpetuo romp of a toccata in classic French celebratory style, and the organist is required to handle fistfuls (and feetfuls) of notes from the start Read more ...