Category: Recitals/Concerts

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…

It’s hard to believe live performances of Mahler’s Third Symphony – the longest symphony in the standard repertoire – only began life in the UK in 1961 when a performance…

In its single contribution to this year’s promenade concerts, the London Philharmonic Orchestra took us to exotic and faraway regions, as far from the Albert Hall as one could imagine.…

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…

Music of life-affirming vigour, then chilling intensity was the focus of this curious juxtaposition from the Budapest Festival Orchestra under its founding director Iván Fischer. The unalloyed joy of Beethoven’s…

For my generation, as well as for me personally, Pierre Boulez’s Mahler was probably the most influential of all. My Mahlerian coming of age coincided with his decisive return to…

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Is Berio’s Sinfonia a masterpiece, or a work of its time that today seems outdated?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

Outreach performances are often viewed as a rite of passage for young aspiring opera singers, in many cases involving travel to schools for 8 A.M. assembly performances. The advantage Canto…