Many orchestral concerts leaven two or three established classics with something new or unusual. The LSO reversed that formula at the Barbican last night, with three pieces written since 2000 offset by just one familiar item, Sibelius’s Third Symphony. The result was invigorating, challenging – and very enjoyable.The presiding artistic mind was that of Thomas Adès, featuring both as conductor and composer. His passion for the music he had chosen shone through, overcoming the rough-and-readiness of his baton technique, and his enthusiasm brought forth a range of sounds from the orchestra Read more ...

It’s weird, if wonderful, that vibrant young composers at the end of the 19th century should have featured death so prominently in their hero-sagas. Assume their inspiration came from Wagner’s Siegmund, Siegfried and Tristan. But Sibelius, Mahler and Richard Strauss took very different paths on the route to obliteration. That’s only one of many things that helps to make Hannu Lintu’s three-year exploration of Sibelius in the context of his predecessors and contemporaries so fascinating.The Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s new Artistic Partner (pictured below by Antti Sihlman) not only took on Read more ...

Does the orchestra that sways together play together? Quite apart from their (reliably gorgeous) sound, the tight-packed strings of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig made quite a sight at the Proms as they collectively surged through key passages of Dvořák and Sibelius as if staging a succession of seated Mexican waves. That, of course, was merely the visible token of the seamless integration that their music director, Andris Nelsons (pictured below), sought and found in this concert that brought the Leipzigers’ legendary focus, density and polish to the Royal Albert Hall. All that fabled Read more ...

 Donizetti: Songs Vols. 3 & 4 Michael Spyres (tenor), Carlo Rizzi (piano) – Vol. 3, Marie-Nicole Lemieux (mezzo-soprano), Giulio Zappa (piano) – Vol. 4. (Opera Rara)“The songs Donizetti poured forth during his composing career have [..] been unjustly neglected…. In their totality these compositions make a powerful case for Donizetti as a key figure in nineteenth-century domestic music-making,” writes Roger Parker, who acts as repertoire consultant to Opera Rara, and is in the process of establishing a new critical edition of them. Opera Rara is releasing a total of eight volumes, or Read more ...

 Paavo Järvi: The Complete Erato Recordings (Erato)Big box sets celebrating great conductors are piling up thick and fast, and this one, unusually, features an artist who’s very much alive. Paavo Järvi is just 62 (still young for a conductor). These 31 discs contain the albums he released for Virgin Classics, EMI and Erato between 1996 and 2015: classical CDs were still a big thing back in the late 1990s, and it’s remarkable to see how much quirky repertoire Virgin Classics allowed Järvi to record, including Stenhammar, Arvo Pärt, Eduard Tubin and Erkki-Sven Tüür. One of the earliest Read more ...

This autumn, the Philharmonia’s “Nordic Soundscapes” season promises music suffused with the epic vistas, and weather, of high latitudes, along with reflections on the climate crisis as it threatens the traditional bonds between nature and culture. So far, so piously programmatic. But what difference can such a high-minded schema make to the music made by the orchestra’s outdoorsy Finnish maestro, Santtu-Mathias Rouvali, and his colleagues? On last night’s evidence from the Royal Festival Hall, enough to refresh and reframe the works they play. In particular, Sir Stephen Hough’s bracing Read more ...

Somehow those of us required to translate the musical experience into words look for the moments which defeat us. One such was the extraordinary sound of muted first violins and cellos at the start of the second movement in Sibelius’s First Symphony last night. Pinpointing its essence feels impossible, but it could only have come from the London Symphony Orchestra’s special relationship with its new Chief Conductor Antonio Pappano.It can’t have been planned at the time of the commission, but an alliance was forged between the Sibelius symphony and the new work on the programme, James Read more ...

 Chopin: Études op.10 & op.25 Yunchan Lim (Decca)Chopin Nicolas van Poucke (Night Dreamer)I’m reviewing these two Chopin discs by a pair of young men together, even though there are lots of differences between their playing, and the way the albums have been put together. Yunchan Lim is just 20, the youngest ever winner of the Van Cliburn competition, in 2022. His first album, on Decca, is of Chopin’s Études (the op.10 and op.25 sets), which are favourites of mine, and perfect “young man’s music” in their unashamed show-offiness and heart-on-sleeve emotionalism. That they are Read more ...

There was a common factor in the superficially disparate elements of this Hallé concert, and it wasn’t just the fact that both soloist and conductor were female. It was an experience of the colours of the music and a sense of enjoyment of what orchestral music offers.The conductor was Kristiina Poska, chief conductor of the Flanders Symphony Orchestra and herself Estonian, with a firm track record in concert hall and opera house. She has a reputation for her interpretations of Sibelius and brought her reading of his First Symphony to this podium, but first she offered us Brits something Read more ...

 Paavo Berglund: The Warner Edition (Warner Classics)Jean Sibelius’s presence looms over this box like a friendly giant. Paavo Berglund (interestingly, one of the few left-handed conductors to have achieved international fame) recorded the seven symphonies three times and revisited the tone poems at various points in his career, and Warner Classics’ acquisition of the old Finlandia catalogue means that almost all of the conductor’s Sibelius is here, filling around half the box. It’s a mark of Berglund’s musical intelligence that there’s never any sense of going through the motions, of Read more ...

Continuing the retrospective aspect of his final season as music director of the Hallé, Sir Mark Elder returned last night to Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, the work with which he opened the orchestra’s 2014-15 Manchester series to such memorable effect.That was the fulfilment of a long-held ambition, he said at the time, and, with the Hallé Choir joining the orchestra for the performance of this “choreographic symphony”, it was no doubt equally satisfying to bring it back in all its glory.But the invigorating exploration of orchestral repertoire that has marked his time with the Hallé was present Read more ...

Until last night, I’d only heard the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (ERSO at home, “Riiklik” standing for “National”) live in unfamiliar contemporary epics, with Kristiina Poska and Anu Tali respectively conducting Lepo Sumera’s Fourth and Sixth Symphonies, and Olari Elts just before his 2020 appointment as Music Director championing an Erkki-Sven Tüür triptych. This was a test of how they'd fare in more familiar repertoire. They passed with flying colours.Arvo Pärt's Cantus to the Memory of Benjamin Britten was the first work by the Estonian master I ever heard in concert, when a then Read more ...