Author: Marc Bridle

There are few composers who have had quite the influence on their fellow compatriots as Sibelius has had on his. Whether it is the effect of the music itself, or…

The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s brief Phoenix Lands series of concerts looks at music from the period after the First World War when empires had crumbled and independent nations were being…

Lili Boulanger was one of the most fascinating – and tragic – of female twentieth-century composers. The first woman to win the Prix de Rome in 1912, for the work…

Duck-quacking effects aside (in the opening work, The Boy and the Heron), this was a dark concert. Both Joe Hisaishi’s The End of the World and Steve Reich’s The Desert…

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Is Berio’s Sinfonia a masterpiece, or a work of its time that today seems outdated?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…