Category: Recitals/Concerts

You always remember exceptional voices when you hear them for the first time. I heard and reviewed Golda Schultz back in 2018 when she made her debut at the Proms.…

A wailing clarinet, a forlorn cor anglais and a post-coital trombone could hardly have been more ear-catching in this arresting performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk given at the Royal…

The Festival Ravel, based in and around Saint-Jean-de-Luz – the delightful town on France’s Atlantic coast that neighbours Ravel’s birthplace Ciboure – was launched in its current form in 2021.…

Performances of Handel’s Alexander’s Feast don’t come along too often; much less the Dublin version of 1742, meticulously recreated here by Peter Whelan, the conductor/director of Irish Baroque, and Donald…

To say Glyndebourne and Le nozze di Figaro are linked is a huge understatement: it was Mozart’s opera, which many see to be the most perfect ever constructed, that launched…

Given that Beethoven’s final symphony normally has a playing time of just over an hour, what can you sensibly pair with it in the first half? Something else by Beethoven,…

It used to be a fairly rare treat to hear Suor Angelica, but of late there have been a number of significant stagings. Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten is rarer…

Hailed by many commentators as a choral masterpiece, Delius’s A Mass of Life is an expansive choral extravaganza taking inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. The composer interprets the…

This should be what the Proms is all about. ‘Super-size me,’ said Cosimo I de’ Medici when asking for music (probably not a direct quote); and there is certainly a…

Making unusual connections is one of the hallmarks of the BBC Proms. Honouring Sofia Gubaidulina, who died aged 93 in March, this concert opened with the sound of soft tubular…