To St James’s Piccadilly to hear the young pianist Misha Kaploukhii give an impressive performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, accompanied by the Greenwich Chamber Orchestra. Kaploukhii is a rising star, a postgraduate at the Royal College of Music where he recently won the Concerto Competition, and I enjoyed his reading of a favourite concerto of mine.And although he isn’t yet the finished article – as I’m sure he himself would admit – he is certainly a pianist I will be keeping my eye on. The Fourth Concerto starts with a Beethovenian novelty, the piano alone playing a chordal Read more ...

 British Piano Concertos: Walton, Britten & Tippett Clare Hammond (piano), BBC Symphony Orchestra/George Vass (BIS Records)I really liked this programme of neglected British piano concertos by the always excellent pianist Clare Hammond, accompanied by conductor George Vass, himself committed to the cause of promoting British music over many years. Britten’s one-handed Diversions, written for Paul Wittgenstein, and Walton’s Sinfonia Concertante are both full of youthful vivacity, although both have troubled histories.Best known by far is Michael Tippett’s Piano Concerto, a top-three Read more ...

Never mind the permutations (anything up to eight hands on the two pianos); feel the unwavering quality of the eight pianists and the 13 works, each perfect in their proper place across two and a half hours of more or less continuous music. Above all, applaud the artistic directors of the London Piano Festival, Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen, for choosing so unerringly how and with whom to celebrate this spectacular 10th anniversary. Given the even distribution of superb pianism and compelling repertoire, it will merely be a matter of personal preference what came out tops for various Read more ...

High on the hill of fascinating New Ross in County Wexford sits its greatest treasure, the ruined 13th century Gothic beauty of St Mary’s. Unless you come at it from the east, its glories are concealed behind the working church which completes it and takes the place of the old nave, built in 1813 and “improved” twice later that century.Plain and spacious inside, with a few military memorials on the wall, the acoustics of its shoebox shape (think a smaller Musikvereinsaal without the trimmings) are perfect, as pianists great and less well-known have attested over the 19 years of the stunningly Read more ...

It was a hefty evening, as it needn't necessarily have been throughout, since Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony can conceal more darkness between the lines in a lighter take. In his second full concert of his second season as the wildly successful and popular Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, Antonio Pappano spared us none of the hard-hitting.Nor did the phenomenal pianist Seong-Jin Cho in Prokofiev’s colossal Second Piano Concerto, drawing as usual crowds of his fellow South Koreans. It was neither Pappano's nor Cho's fault if I’d recently heard interpretations of that and Read more ...

My final visit to the Proms for this year was a Sunday double-header of the RPO playing Respighi, Milhaud and Vaughan Williams at 11am and an evening concert of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and massed choirs in Gipps, Grieg and Bliss.The matinée (★★★★) was a set of three cityscapes, depicting Rome, Rio and London. Respighi’s The Pines of Rome is a terrific orchestral showpiece, low on memorable musical content but high on vivacity, gorgeous in its Technicolor scoring and performed here with pizzazz by the RPO, especially in the second and fourth movements. After the rumbustious opening Read more ...

Back in the day, when America’s late-night chat show hosts and their guests sat happily smoking as they shot the breeze for a growing audience, the most sought after guest was Oscar Levant. No longer a household name except to fans of vintage Hollywood musicals, in some of which, notably An American in Paris, he appeared, Levant (b 1906) was the Swiss Army knife of the entertainment business: a virtuoso pianist, composer, conductor, actor, a writer of hilarious memoirs, a raconteur with his own TV chat show. He was also beset with mental health problems, notably OCD, hypochondria and Read more ...

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. In the Queen’s Hall on Tuesday morning, Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy joined forces in a programme of four-handed piano (★★★★★), sometimes on one keyboard and sometimes on two, that climaxed in a transcendent, dazzling, occasionally stupefying performance of Messiaen’s visionary Visions de l’Amen. From the very opening, Kolesnikov played Read more ...

According to the programme, Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra is heard somewhere around the world every other week. In which case I’ve been unlucky in never having heard it live before, despite being a fan for nearly 30 years. So I was relieved that last night’s Prom’s outing – in Tadaaki Otaka’s farewell with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, after a 40 year collaboration – didn’t disappoint.The playing was urgent, colourful and glorious  - everything I could have wanted. Completed in 1945, the Concerto is a direct descendant of Bartók’s, and this came over loud and clear in the Read more ...

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. Having proved his credentials in dance music with a Portsmouth performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Act 2 last December, Wigglesworth struck a similarly spacious mix of control and relaxation in the Shostakovich Suite Read more ...

Alfred Brendel’s death earlier this month came as a shock, but it wasn’t unexpected. His health had gradually deteriorated over the last year or so, and I was fortunate to see him just a few days before he died. I visited him for one of our regular film nights – evenings when we’d eat dinner together, prepared by his partner Maria, and then watch a movie. On this occasion we’d decided to take in the recently-made German documentary about Leni Riefenstahl. It struck me that it would be a perfect choice, given Alfred had grown up watching Nazi films in the Zagreb cinema his father had run Read more ...

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.The circumstances are unique. Kolesnikov and Tsoy welcome you as if into their home to sit in a close semi-circle for wonders in the schoolroom at the top of the building – now more spacious, Read more ...