Author: Marc Bridle

Memories of Pierre Boulez continue to hover over this year’s Proms like a spectre at the feast. My first encounter with Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin – his masterpiece, in my…

The Singaporean-born conductor Kahchun Wong is certainly a fascinating one based on this performance of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. A winner of the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition (2016), where he conducted…

Is Berio’s Sinfonia a masterpiece, or a work of its time that today seems outdated? Written in 1968 during a time of revolution it is not in itself a work…

Mahler, Ravel and Schoenberg all agreed that Richard Strauss’s Salome was amongst his greatest works and in a performance as compelling as this one it would have been almost convincing…

The centenary of Pierre Boulez’s birth might well bring with it many performances of his works but perhaps none will be quite so breathtaking in the UK as this one…

It has been 15 years since Riccardo Muti last returned to the Philharmonia Orchestra, and very much longer since he last conducted Verdi’s Requiem with them, so this concert should…

Guildhall Symphony Orchestra concerts are always something of an event and this one was no exception. Taking in a Swedish modern classic, one of Benjamin Britten’s finest works and a…

On the face of it music criticism has often seemed to me a very unimaginative profession. Take this BBCSO concert, for example, the programming of which has largely appeared to…