The Budapest Festival Orchestra are a crack ensemble. And under Iván Fischer they can do everything that is possible – and nearly anything impossible, too. They brought with them to…
Category: Recitals/Concerts
To Sing of Love: VOCES8 – LIVE from London Summer 2023
VOCES8’s LIVE From London Summer 2023 festival feels a bit mis-named – but that’s only because the nine concerts which form this summer’s online festival, which runs from 12th August…
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey inspires magnificent performances of two Ligeti masterpieces at the Proms
Film music has long been a theme of classical concerts – although this sold-out concert given by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Edward Gardner was just a little different. It…
Barry Kosky’s production of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites travels from Glyndebourne to the Proms
Francis Poulenc’s opera Dialogues des Carmélites retells the true story of the Martyrs of Compiègne who were executed on 17th July 1794, during the French Revolution, for refusing to comply…
Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha brings an iridescent glow to Strauss’s Four Last Songs at the Proms
Copland, Hindemith and Strauss are not obvious bedfellows. However, the focus on the 1940s from either side of the Atlantic made perfect sense for this annual Prom appearance of the…
Thrilling performances of Rachmaninov and Walton at the Proms
There’s a danger that a little-known work not previously performed in the UK may be all too quickly erased from memory when familiar works grab the listener’s attention, especially when…
Mark Elder and the Hallé: a superlative Russian Prom of gripping power and intensity
Longevity clearly matters. I do not mean in the age of its conductors, although this sometimes is important, but by the length of time they have spent with their orchestras.…
Wine, women and song: a tremendous celebration of spring, joy and love at the Proms, from the CBSO and Kazuki Yamada
Wine, women and song. Immortalized by Johann Strauss II in his 1869 Op.333 waltz, Wein, Weib und Gesang, this was also the title that John Addington Symonds gave to his…
The Faerie Bride: sensuousness and mysticism at the Three Choirs Festival
This programme by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, on the second evening of this year’s Three Choirs Festival presented three works that were prevailingly sombre…
‘Mozart and the Munich Hofkapelle’: an enlightening evening
To the Munich Residenz’s Rococo Cuvilliés-Theater, once simply the Residenztheater, for a fascinating concert entitled ‘Mozart and the Munich Hofkapelle’. It was here, on 29 January 1781, that Idomeneo received…