The Royal Northern Sinfonia handed its players artistic control of the programme for this livestream from the Sage, Gateshead and if the result lacked coherence it certainly had the variety and diversity missing from the Wigmore Hall Nash Ensemble recital I reviewed last month.

The drunkard in spring; the lonely man in autumn; the long goodbye. Mahler’s last song-cycle often seems to embody solitude; a resigned, earthly counterpart to the transcendent rapture of his previous work, the Eighth Symphony, as a superstitious talisman to ward off the finality of a Ninth.

Marking its 40th anniversary, this year’s Ryedale Festival kicked off with an online-only spring series ahead of the main festival later this summer. With any luck, by then, the festival’s rural Yorkshire venues will be filled with people once more, but for now audiences can experience beautiful music made in beautiful places wherever they are at home. 

We may not be in the EU any more, but geographically and culturally we can celebrate being part of Europe as much as we jolly well like. For Europe Day, the European Parliament Liaison Office, the Camōes Institute, the Embassy of Portugal and the Delegation of the EU in the UK staged a special lunchtime concert at St John’s Smith Square, given by the Northern Chords Festival Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Bloxham. 

This Philharmonia concert from the Royal Festival Hall comprised three masterworks of English music, following a (welcome) trend that has emerged in COVID-era streamed concerts in digging out a couple of smaller-scale, less often programmed pieces to put alongside a sure-fire hit.

“You have to be careful you’re not judging the piece,” cautioned a pearl-necklaced Nicholas Daniel, great oboist and winner of the 1980 BBC Young Musician (of the Year, as it then was).

Wigmore Hall does not dish up a great deal of contemporary music, preferring a menu of mainstream chamber music. But this programme by the Nash Ensemble offered a different kind of mainstream: within the world of contemporary music this was a middle-of-the-road offering.

Some lockdown-era recital programmes have doled out miserly short measures, as performers gallop through a brief, rushed hour (or less) of music as if afraid to tax the online patience of their disembodied audience.

What comes to mind when you think of Brian Elias? The violence and humming, background threat of The Judas Tree, his score for Kenneth MacMillan’s brutal final ballet?

I Fagiolini do not just do choral concerts. Indeed, director Robert Hollingworth claimed in the pre-concert chat, he finds choral concerts boring.