You have to admire Samantha Fernando’s concept of the “To Do” list. Hers has one item: “Do Less”. That’s the subtitle of one section of the new work, Wintering, for which she wrote both words and music.It was heard for the first time in the North of England last night in a concert by four voices of the Marian Consort and a Manchester Collective string quartet (the premiere was at the Wigmore Hall last week).Oddly enough, there’s nothing about winter in the evocation of a guided meditation, with a soprano voice speaking the random thoughts actually going on in the head of a participant, which Read more ...

Since 1981 Ryedale Festival has presented a mouthwatering array of concerts in picturesque churches and glorious stately homes in North East Yorkshire, characterised by interval drinks and picnics in lovely gardens or sunny terraces on long summer evenings. This year it took a short, sharp dive into a very different seasonal atmosphere, presenting its first Winter Weekend from 21 to 23 November, with just four events in the charming market towns of Pickering, Malton and Norton.Pianist Ethan Loch, who won the keyboard final of BBC Young Musician in 2022, set the scene in his opening recital on Read more ...

Even top conductors can have difficulty with Elgar’s late romantic suppleness. Vasily Petrenko of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Santtu-Mattias Rouvali of the Philharmonia have made a heavy meal out of the “Concert Overture” (= symphonic poem) In the South (Alassio). Not Edward Gardner with his London Philharmonic players, strings on top, glowing form, woodwind hyper-sensitive, in a perfectly paced journey of a soul.Elgar took his melancholic as well as his boisterous side on holiday in Italy. Gardner’s trajectory was one of restlessness and unease eventually erupting in a vision of Read more ...

Bah-humbuggers like me are happy to pass over seasonal fare, maybe excepting a Messiah or Christmas Oratorio, and look ahead to the birds that sing in the spring. That was the theme for this light-of-touch rattlebag, with versatile top quality on display from all performers.Maybe parts of it smacked of a tantalising taster menu. Violinist Braimah Kanneh-Mason came on at the start, advertised only through the first of Fantasia mover and shaker Tom Fetherstonhaugh’s short speeches, to twitter with leader Millie Ashton in the opening Allegro of Vivaldi’s “Spring” Concerto - so fresh and buoyant Read more ...

Image  American Dream: music by Amy Beach, Dana Suesse and Victor Babin Ludmila Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle (pianos), Orchestre Victor Hugo/Jean-François Verdier and Lauren Comte (Alpha Classics)Wife and husband two-piano duo Ludmilla Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle have form when it comes to exhuming rare repertoire, and this new anthology doesn’t disappoint. Amy Beach’s name was on my radar, but Dana Suesse and Victor Babin were new to me. Learning about their backstories proved to be as interesting as hearing their music. Take Read more ...

Mozart’s unfinished C Minor mass lacks a canonical completion of the sort that Süssmayr so famously – and still contentiously – imposed on the Requiem. Even without its Agnus Dei and chunks of the Credo, however, the showpiece mass planned for the Salzburg abbey in 1783 remains a mighty and stirring piece whose choral and solo peaks more than match the later work. At St Martin’s, David Bates, his group La Nuova Musica, and the Schola Cantorum of Oxford, brought to it not just passages of period-sensitive refinement but a full-bodied, big-boned weight and depth of sound. With almost 30 Read more ...

I have always been a bit ambivalent about the music of Arvo Pärt, recognising his achievement in crafting a new kind of choral music, while often finding it hard to love, especially in large doses. Which is why I welcomed the approach of the Carice Singers (with Christopher Bowers-Broadbent on the organ) and George Parris in making this concert, one of a series marking Pärt’s 90th birthday, also a celebration of a much younger Estonian composer whose music, although very different, made for an intriguing point of comparison. Evelin Seppar (b.1986) (pictured below by by Sade-triis Read more ...

Britten was less in the Weekend than the annual title suggested, however significant and striking the works: a singular song cycle, an anguished early viola solo transcribed for cello and a minute-long final sketch. His influence was strong, it’s true, in unforgettable inspirations by Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Philip Moore. Their texts, by Ian McMillan and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, declared the real connection in two of the finest small-scale concerts I’ve heard this year: remembrance. Because it was this, white-poppied as well as red, which threaded the deep thinking and feeling, and brought Read more ...

Elena Schwarz was back in Manchester to conduct the BBC Philharmonic only just over two weeks since her visit to the Hallé, and again conducting some mainstream heavyweight works in which her clarity of beat and fresh approach brought rich rewards.She showed in her debut concert with the Philharmonic in 2021 and a repeat visit the following year that she can handle new music with equal assurance, and the central work in this programme was a relatively novel one: Dani Howard’s Trombone Concerto, written for and again this time performed by Peter Moore. Written during the Covid shut-down, it Read more ...

Sir Mark Elder was back on the scene of past triumphs last night as he returned to the Hallé at the Bridgewater Hall – and he has not lost his taste for the slightly unexpected.This was a bill that featured both a knight (himself) and a dame – Imogen Cooper as concerto soloist (pictured below) – and its first outing pulled a gratifyingly large crowd for a programme that was in two respects somewhat off the beaten track. Sibelius’s Scènes historiques Suite no. 2 isn’t heard particularly frequently, and Dvořák’s Symphony no. 5 does not hold the place of his last two in popular esteem. Elder’s Read more ...

Am I dreaming? Did I really see a living composer of contemporary music given a prolonged standing ovation for conducting his own works in the Bridgewater Hall, twice over?We all know the difference between polite applause for new music and real enthusiasm. And John Adams seems to have a following who show the real thing – of a variety of age groups, too. The California-based creator began his own festival with the Hallé on Thursday night with two pieces which were part of the celebration of the opening of the hall 29 years ago, one of them – Slonimsky’s Earbox – then receiving its world Read more ...

The greatest procession of mass movements ever composed merits the best line-up of soloists, both vocal and instrumental, as well as the perfect ensemble – small in size, big and rich in sound where needed – and inspired direction. That it was likely to get them seemed obvious from the advertised names, but last night, as always, Peter Whelan inspired everyone to go beyond what we might have imagined.He applies pressure points imperceptibly everywhere so that Bach opens out from period-style devotion to something more operatic, above all in the first choruses of the B minor Mass and Read more ...