Opening acts don’t always enjoy a full house, but at at the Royal Albert Hall at the end of a UK tour in support of Suzanne Vega and her acclaimed new album Flying with Angels, there was a warm and generous welcome for singer-songwriter Katherine Priddy’s opening five-song set, drawn from her first two albums, The Eternal Rocks Beneath and The Pendulum Swing, and featuring a preview from the third, These Frightening Machines, due in March.The new song is “Matches”, about the witch trials, but a springboard, too, to broader and wider concerns that persist and exist beyond historical time. They Read more ...

Critics (including this one) casually refer to John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London as an all-star outfit, an army made up of generals. This week I was able to see, and hear, exactly what that means. A few days ago, in Scotland, I marvelled at flautist Adam Walker’s agility and versatility in his outstanding performances with the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective at the Lammermuir Festival. Yesterday, on the penultimate night of the Proms, there he was again with the Sinfonia, a stand-out soloist in key passages from Strauss’s tone-poem Don Juan and, above all, in the complete version, 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 ...

Every year, the Royal Albert Hall proves complicit in the magic of the quietest utterances if, as Barenboim put it, you let the audience come to you and don’t try too hard. Pekka Kuusisto is the ultimate communicator, the ideal guide for the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. Stitching "classical" string music with numbers from a Sámi singer, Katarina Barruk, though, didn’t quite come off.Barruk (pictured below) is a striking performer, with her silver dress, her inherited jewellery and the strange, fluid movements she uses to accompany her Sámi joiks, a very specific kind of song. Contrary Read more ...

Many Londoners would already have experienced the musicality incarnate of Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra. A smaller ensemble rocked two of Irish National Opera’s Vivaldi specials in the Linbury Theatre – one a major award winner – and the best Messiah I’ve ever heard in the Wigmore Hall. Their first Prom was pure celebration, and how they filled the Royal Albert Hall, both collectively and solo-wise, in the revised Dublin version of Alexander’s Feast.Surprisingly, this is only the second ensemble from the Republic of Ireland to visit the Proms; I was in the Arena 46 years ago ( Read more ...

11am concerts do take some getting used to. The BBC Proms season has no fewer than seven of them this year, three on Saturdays and four on Sundays. And yet, strangely, for this programme, mainly consisting of works for concert band, it did genuinely seem like the right time of day.This is open-hearted, maybe even community-minded music, and when it is played with the panache, joy and precision that the London Symphony Orchestra’s wind, brass and percussion brought to it, the feeling of morning freshness is undeniable.That was particularly the case with the opener, Vaughan Williams’s  Read more ...

One door closes, and another one opens. A lot. It’s extraordinary what value those two simple additions to the Royal Albert Hall stage lent to Glyndebourne’s performance of The Marriage of Figaro at the Proms.Combined with some niftily manoeuvred furniture, minimal suggestions of a garden for the outside scenes, and the genius touch of a bathtub for the Count in Act Three, a few strategically deployed items made sure that we enjoyed pretty much a full staging of this signature piece for the Sussex house.The cast, in period costume, used the width of their space well and climbed, when 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 ...

How often is an orchestral concert perfect in every texture, every instrumental entry, every phrase? Wednesday's Phiharmonia Prom struck sound-spectrum gold, but its chief conductor, Santtu Matias Rouvali, could do with more humanity. My colleague Rachel Halliburton found his fellow Finn Klaus Mäkelä challenging in Mahler’s Fifth on Saturday night, but on Sunday afternoon neither he nor his fellow musicians put a foot wrong; indeed, feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.Mozart might have been a style challenge for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra's chief conductor elect, most familiar Read more ...

Klaus Mäkelä teased out all the fragility and the sense of impending mortality in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, revealing a vision that was as intricate as it was quietly luminous. Famously Mahler almost died from an intestinal haemorrhage in the year that he started composing the work, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s sensitive, nuanced performance conveyed his heightened awareness of a world that could suddenly disappear without warning.Mäkelä will become Chief Conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 2027, and this performance was a good demonstration of the supple intimacy that Read more ...

Pianist Bruce Liu wasn’t the only star soloist last night, though he certainly had the most notes to play. Attention was riveted by at least five Philharmonia members and their maverick principal conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali as percussionist in a joyful Prom.First off the mark was Antoine Siguré, probably the most compelling orchestral timpanist I’ve ever encountered. Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, daughter of two of Los Folkloristica’s founding members, gifted him solo rollickings which gave her Antrópolis the nature of a concerto, punctuated by snatches of music from Mexico City’s Read more ...

At first, I had my doubts about Puccini’s Suor Angelica in this concert performance at the Proms with Sir Antonio Pappano and his London Symphony Orchestra.With the big band (up to and including Richard Gowers’s organ) arrayed far behind the conductor, the singers marshalled in a line in front, and the extensive ranks of the London Symphony Chorus and Tiffin Boys’ Choir rising on all sides, the Royal Albert Hall seemed to have turned Puccini’s late (1918) chamber opera – the detached final third of his portmanteau trilogy Il Trittico – into the form that this venue once loved best of all: an Read more ...