Classical Reviews
theartsdesk at the Pärnu Music Festival 2025 - Arvo Pärt at 90 flanked by lightness and warmthTuesday, 29 July 2025
Life-changing? That's how the Pärnu Music Festival felt on my first visit in 2015, alongside the discovery of Estonia as a pillar of the European Union ideal. It’s also how Palestinian Lamar Elias, a student on the annual conducting course, described Paavo Järvi’s Beethoven Seven this year with his Estonian Festival Orchestra: a typical high repeated the next night with Arvo Pärt’s Credo to follow. Read more... |
BBC Proms: Batsashvili, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ryan Wigglesworth review - grief and gloryMonday, 28 July 2025
This Prom began in sombre and melancholic shades of grey. Then, as her encore, the superb Georgian pianist Mariam Batsashvili launched into Liszt’s Paganini étude, “La Campanella”, and bells of long-awaited joy rang around the Royal Albert Hall. Under those leaping acrobatic fingers, musical sunshine drove away the clouds. Read more... |
BBC Proms: McCarthy, Bournemouth SO, Wigglesworth review - spring-heeled varietyTuesday, 22 July 2025
It started like Sunday afternoon band concert on a seaside promenade, a massive ensemble playing it light. But while there were several too many Shostakovich pops, the Ravel concerto and Walton symphony ahead sailed for deeper waters, And the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is on top form, lucky to have one of the world’s best conductors, Mark Wigglesworth, in charge. Read more... |
BBC Proms: First Night, Batiashvili, BBCSO, Oramo review - glorious Vaughan WilliamsSaturday, 19 July 2025
The auditorium and arena were packed – and the stage even more so, bursting at the seams with players and singers: the perfect set-up for a First Night of the Proms. This is traditionally an opportunity to programme a large-scale choral work, and last night that was Vaughan Williams’s seldom heard Sancta Civitas. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Ravenna Festival 2025 - Cervantes, Beethoven and Byron transfiguredThursday, 10 July 2025
Anyone seeking local genius in an international festival should look no further than the annual Ravenna concerts from Riccardo Muti – Neapolitan by birth, Ravennate by adoption – with his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra. Well, maybe a little further if you have basic Italian: 2025 sees the completion of a second walkabout theatre trilogy involving citizens of Ravenna and beyond, masterminded by two greats equal to Muti in their own unique ways, Ermanna Montanari and Marco Martinelli. Read more... |
Siglo de Oro, Wigmore Hall review - electronic Lamentations and Trojan tragedySaturday, 05 July 2025
Siglo de Oro are a vocal ensemble who specialise in older music – and especially neglected older music – but they have also always programmed new music, and the centrepiece of this recital at the Wigmore Hall was a large-scale commission by composer Ben Rowarth, to words by Sophia Carr-Gomm. Read more... |
Aldeburgh Festival, Weekend 2 review - nine premieres, three young ensembles - and Allan ClaytonThursday, 26 June 2025
Actually it was a Thursday evening to Saturday experience, but what riches in seven concerts. The only Britten I heard was one of the Six Metamorphoses after Ovid as I approached the Red House on a hot Saturday morning, just too late for that pop-up performance, but in time for Berio. The old guard of composers made a mixed impression, but one of several highlights was to discover how imaginative the new generation is proving in six world premieres. Read more... |
Schubertiade 3 at the Ragged Music Festival, Mile End review - five great musicians keep spirits soaringTuesday, 24 June 2025
Aldeburgh offered strong competition for the three evenings of Schubert at the discreetly restored Ragged School Museum, but I knew I had to return for the last event of Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy’s third festival here, much as I’d love to have heard Allan Clayton in Britten’s Our Hunting Fathers. And if anything, the three-part all-Schubert programme was even more levitational than I’d expected. Read more... |
Immersive Night Music Show, Makita, Londinium Ensemble, World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens - multimedia musings on a midsummer nightTuesday, 24 June 2025
To mark this year’s summer solstice, a small audience gathered at London’s newest concert venue, the World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens, a small and perfectly formed hall bristling with “state-of-the-art” acoustics and digital facilities. On a balmy midsummer’s evening, the pianist and composer Rieko Makita invited us to reflect on the different moods and aspects of the night, in a programme that combined music with digital art projections. Read more... |
RNCM International Diploma Artists, BBC Philharmonic, MediaCity, Salford review - spotting stars of tomorrowSaturday, 21 June 2025
Two concerts in the BBC Philharmonic’s series in their own studio form the climax of studies at the Royal Northern College of Music for a small number of soloists on the postgraduate International Artist Diploma there, and also for some young conductors on the master’s course run by Mark Heron and Clark Rundell. Read more... |
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