JS Bach: St John Passion Pygmalion/Raphaël Pichon (Harmonia Mundi)Handel: Messiah Irish Baroque Orchestra/Peter Whelan (Linn) Image Here are brilliant additions to the discography of the two of the greatest choral masterpieces, both of which I have listened to repeatedly over this Easter period. The French choir and ensemble Pygmalion, under its founder and director Raphaël Pichon, has been working its way through the biggies of the repertoire in recent years: in addition to their Bach (brilliant versions of the St Matthew Passion and the Read more ...

A concert by the National Youth Orchestra is like no other. For one thing, there are 160 of them – you simply don’t get the kind of power and intensity they can create from a normal-sized orchestra.  For another, they play with an enthusiasm and eagerness that even the most committed and devoted professionals would find hard to emulate. They want to share their music: they want you to feel it as they do.  And the skill levels are right up there with the best of them, too.It’s a fact that in theatre or dance those whose bodies are still approaching maturity are necessarily unable to Read more ...

The Southbank Centre’s second Multitudes festival – which commissions artists ranging from filmmakers to acrobats to shine new light onto the orchestral repertoire – began last night in triumph with the Aurora Orchestra’s celebrated performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring from memory. As a musical feat alone this seemed the equivalent to building a human pyramid on a tightrope above the Thames, but the Aurora Orchestra heightened the challenge by sweeping us back to 1913 for a dramatised account of the Rite’s origin. Experiments fusing classical music and theatre are, perhaps Read more ...

Antonio Pappano’s pairing for last night’s Barbican concert intrigued – and, initially, baffled – me. Shostakovich’s Fifth: a clear choice, given the London Symphony Orchestra’s recent stellar accounts of the Russian’s major symphonies. Its preface, however, came in the unpredictable form of Korngold’s violin concerto, under the bow of the supremely elegant and tasteful Vilde Frang.Between Hollywood and Leningrad, however, Pappano and his high-achieving band struck up a truly engrossing dialogue. Questions of kitsch and sentiment, of freedom and compulsion, of authenticity and artifice, Read more ...

The Northern Chamber Orchestra is unusual in that it plays almost always without a conductor. It’s been doing that for nearly 60 years, and there’s a unique frisson to be had from experiencing orchestral music-making done almost entirely through eye contact, careful listening and telepathy, as real chamber music always is.At the same time, with larger numbers of players and complicated scores, it’s a bit of a high-wire act. Its concert at King’s School Macclesfield was a demonstration of how well it can work and how testing the concept can be.A Haydn symphony is sure ground for the NCO: in Read more ...

Good Friday and the days before it are times to contemplate Bach's great passions - the St Matthew was performed at the Baden-Baden Easter Festival before I arrived with Klaus Mäkelä conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra - but not so much another powerful ritual. Britten's War Requiem seared the soul again this Good Friday with the profoundly impressive Joana Mallwitz conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and it seemed like a masterpiece equal to Bach's. Not quite so much could be said of Wagner's Lohengrin, which I heard on Easter Sunday, though it has stretches of greatness and was Read more ...

I’ve always liked to think that, when it comes to artistic performance, comparisons are odious (or oderous, as Dogberry had it). There is one glory of the sun and another of the moon, etc. A performer should be judged on what they do on one occasion, how it speaks to their audience, and not by saying that they’re better or worse than someone else.And yet we do it all the time. We compare X’s performance with Y’s – reviewers do it constantly – and we may have one in mind from the past, or a recording, that’s our benchmark for everything else. And today’s world of classical music, including Read more ...

Was it a risk to attend a third Irish Baroque Orchestra Matthew Passion in as many years, given that previous indelible interpretations had come from Helen Charlston, Hugh Cutting and Nick Pritchard? Not really, because the shaping hand of Peter Whelan, musicianship incarnate, was bound to give us the connected dramatic arc in Bach's greatest of masterpieces as usual. And as ever he had several equals among the instrumental and vocal soloists.The revelation this year was the Christus of Frederick Long (pictured above on the right), supported by hyper-expressive work from the strings of Read more ...

Brahms: Trio Op. 114, Robert & Clara Schumann: Romances. Joachim: Hebrew Melodies Tabea Zimmermann (viola), Javier Perianes (piano) Jean-Guihen Queyras (cello) (Harmonia Mundi) Image That sound! The glorious resonant tone which Tabea Zimmermann finds way down in the lower reaches of the viola is absolutely irresistible. The first taste of it that we get is when she takes the plunge into the central section of the second of Robert Schumann’s Op. 94 Romances – she takes her time with it these days, relishing it far more than in the more Read more ...

Nowhere welcomes Ukrainians (and Palestinians too, for that matter) more warmly than Ireland, and especially Dublin. A standing ovation twice over was guaranteed, and well deserved after their perfect performance of Beethoven's Third, "Eroica" Symphony. Otherwise, no special case needed to be made for these distinguished visitors beyond the perception and beauty of their playing under no-nonsense Artistic Director and Chief Conductor Volodymyr Sirenko.Robert Beale reviewed their programme culminating in Beethoven's Seventh in Manchester. Here the two Delius nature-pictures they so cannily Read more ...

This was a concert of music by living women composers, and I guess you could call all three of its components protest music. Cheerful or sad, smart or overwhelming, each work had a point to make – and a sense of outrage. For those who were there, its impact was something they are unlikely to forget for a very long time. (It also drew one of the smallest audiences I can remember for a BBC Philharmonic Saturday night performance at the Bridgewater Hall in recent times: possibly the result of a series booklet which detailed only one of the three items that were finally performed, and even Read more ...

The members of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, on an intensive tour of the UK and Ireland which sees them right now performing daily after long journeys, are heroes by any standard.They are also musicians of high calibre and with a distinguished tradition. The programme they offered in Manchester was designed to link Britain and Ukraine symbolically, but it was – as with all its variants on the tour – built around Beethoven.For a symphony orchestra, their numbers on tour are modest, with 34 string players and 15 others, but it’s a contingent that works very well for Beethoven – Read more ...