Classical music
BBC Proms: Le Concert Spirituel, Niquet review - super-sized polyphonic raritiesMonday, 18 August 2025
There’s a Proms paradox that’s familiar to Early Music fans. Some works are too challenging – too big, too expensive, too uncommercial, too obscure – to do anywhere else. The trouble is, the Royal Albert Hall is the absolute last place you’d want to... Read more... |
Frang, Romaniw, Liverman, LSO, Pappano, Edinburgh International Festival 2025 review - sunlight, salt spray, Sea SymphonySaturday, 16 August 2025
Right from the bracing brass fanfare that began this Sea Symphony, you know exactly where you were: right in the midst of the deck, with the spray in your face and the wind in your hair. The London Symphony Orchestra is midway through a... Read more... |
BBC Proms: A Mass of Life, BBCSO, Elder review - a subtle guide to Delius's Nietzschean masterpieceTuesday, 19 August 2025
For Delius – then a young man, visiting Norway in the late 1880s to walk in its mountains – his first encounter with Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra was nothing less than an epiphany. Already high on the grandeur of nature in a country defined by... Read more... |
Elschenbroich, Grynyuk / Fibonacci Quartet, Edinburgh International Festival 2025 review - mahogany Brahms and explosive JanáčekWednesday, 13 August 2025
Leonard Elschenbroich and Alexei Grynyuk crafted a fine programme for their EIF recital, centring around Brahms’ relationship with the Schumanns. He famously met them in 1853, when Robert Schumann declared him the next great thing in German music.... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Akhmetshina, LPO, Gardner review - liquid luxuriesTuesday, 12 August 2025
Water surged through this Prom from first spray to last drop. But there was nothing damp or diluted about Edward Gardner’s helmsmanship as he steered the London Philharmonic Orchestra through a succession of liquid rhapsodies: three from the early... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Kovachevitsa - top Bulgarians and friends make peerless music in a remote villageTuesday, 12 August 2025
Performers and public alike always treasure a beautiful and, in this case, remote setting for a music festival. But people matter as much as sense of place. When the players work together in various combinations for the duration, and tell you this... Read more... |
Budapest Festival Orchestra, Iván Fischer, Edinburgh International Festival 2025 review - mania and menuetsMonday, 11 August 2025
Fresh from their triumph at the Proms, the Budapest Festival Orchestra arrived at the Edinburgh International Festival with a programme that centred on dance, and culminated in as fine a performance of Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin (the complete... Read more... |
Classical CDs: Hamlet, harps and haikuSaturday, 09 August 2025
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, Ravel: La Valse Orchestre de Paris/Klaus Mäkelä (Decca)Rereading the composer’s memoirs and performing the Symphonie Fantastique have rekindled my interest in all things Berliozian, so this new album arrived at... Read more... |
Kolesnikov, Tsoy / Liu, NCPA Orchestra, Chung, Edinburgh International Festival 2025 review - transfigured playing and heavenly desireFriday, 08 August 2025
Say what you like about this year’s slimmer-than-usual Edinburgh International Festival, but when it has hit the spot, it has done so triumphantly. Nowhere has that so far been truer than in the piano playing, as this pair of concerts demonstrated.... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Láng, Cser, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Iván Fischer review - idiomatic inflectionsThursday, 07 August 2025
“Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night,” quoth Blake. Beethoven and Bartók knew both extremes, but Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra led us from the most dancing of Seventh Symphonies to the endless... Read more... |
Weilerstein, NYO2, Payare / Dueñas, Malofeev, Edinburgh International Festival 2025 review - youthful energy and emotional intensityWednesday, 06 August 2025
NYO2 is a group of dazzlingly talented (and terrifyingly young-looking) 14-17 year olds from the USA, one of Carnegie Hall’s three national youth ensembles, and with a focus on supporting young musicians from communities that are under-represented... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Three Choirs Festival - Passion in the CathedralSaturday, 02 August 2025
“Powerful, Timeless, Inspiring” it says on the front cover of the programme-book for this year’s supposedly 297th Three Choirs Festival at Hereford. So please leave your frivolity at the cathedral door with your gun and your mobile phone.Richard... Read more... |
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