thu 18/09/2025

Classical Reviews

Appl, Levickis, Wigmore Hall review - fun to the fore in cabaret and show songs

Bernard Hughes

Concerts at the Wigmore Hall offer many types of pleasure, but not often an evening so straightforwardly fun as Monday night’s recital by baritone Benjamin Appl and Lithuanian accordion virtuoso Martynas Levickis. Appl is primarily a Lieder singer – but here dived into a stylistically diverse world of music ranging from Mahler to Copland, via Ravel and Kurt Weill.

Read more...

Lammermuir Festival 2025, Part 2 review - from the soaringly sublime to the zoologically ridiculous

Simon Thompson

My colleague Boyd Tonkin visited the Lammermuir Festival for the first time this year. His eyes and ears have been opened to its treasures, but some of us have been in on the secret for years. Importantly, that includes the East Lothian audiences, who have been attending the festival in bigger numbers than ever, ensuring that the festival has sold out almost every concert in its biggest venue, St Mary’s Church, Haddington, and packed out many other smaller ones, too. 

Read more...

BBC Proms: Ehnes, Sinfonia of London, Wilson review - aspects of love

Boyd Tonkin

Critics (including this one) casually refer to John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London as an all-star outfit, an army made up of generals. This week I was able to see, and hear, exactly what that means. A few days ago, in Scotland, I marvelled at flautist Adam Walker’s agility and versatility in his outstanding performances with the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective at the Lammermuir Festival.

Read more...

Presteigne Festival 2025 review - new music is centre stage in the Welsh Marches

Clare Stevens

If you were a devotee of Dmitri Shostakovich whose only opportunity to attend some live performances marking this year’s 50th anniversary of his death was spending the weekend of 21 - 25 August at the Presteigne Festival, you probably wouldn’t have felt short-changed.

Read more...

Lammermuir Festival 2025 review - music with soul from the heart of East Lothian

Boyd Tonkin

One piece that you’re unlikely to hear at the Lammermuir Festival is Lucia di Lammermoor. As co-director James Waters explained during a drive to the absurdly picturesque church and castle at Crichton (fit setting for a Netflix epic, let alone a blood-soaked bel canto opera), venues and resources do set some limits to works that can be presented to the standards he demands.

Read more...

BBC Proms: Steinbacher, RPO, Petrenko / Sternath, BBCSO, Oramo review - double-bill mixed bag

Bernard Hughes

My final visit to the Proms for this year was a Sunday double-header of the RPO playing Respighi, Milhaud and Vaughan Williams at 11am and an evening concert of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and massed choirs in Gipps, Grieg and Bliss.

Read more...

theartsdesk at the Lahti Sibelius Festival - early epics by the Finnish master in context

David Nice

It’s weird, if wonderful, that vibrant young composers at the end of the 19th century should have featured death so prominently in their hero-sagas. Assume their inspiration came from Wagner’s Siegmund, Siegfried and Tristan. But Sibelius, Mahler and Richard Strauss took very different paths on the route to obliteration. That’s only one of many things that helps to make Hannu Lintu’s three-year exploration of Sibelius in the context of his predecessors and contemporaries so fascinating.

Read more...

Waley-Cohen, Manchester Camerata, Pether, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester review - premiere of no ordinary violin concerto

Robert Beale

Manchester Camerata is enhancing its reputation for pioneering with three performances featuring Nick Martin’s new Violin Concerto, which it has commissioned, two of them in art galleries rather than conventional music venues.

Read more...

BBC Proms: Barruk, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Kuusisto review - vague incantations, precise laments

David Nice

Every year, the Royal Albert Hall proves complicit in the magic of the quietest utterances if, as Barenboim put it, you let the audience come to you and don’t try too hard. Pekka Kuusisto is the ultimate communicator, the ideal guide for the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. Stitching "classical" string music with numbers from a Sámi singer, Katarina Barruk, though, didn’t quite come off.

Read more...

BBC Proms: Alexander’s Feast, Irish Baroque Orchestra, Whelan review - rapturous Handel fills the space

David Nice

Many Londoners would already have experienced the musicality incarnate of Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra. A smaller ensemble rocked two of Irish National Opera’s Vivaldi specials in the Linbury Theatre – one a major award winner – and the best Messiah I’ve ever heard in the Wigmore Hall. Their first Prom was pure celebration, and how they filled the Royal Albert Hall, both collectively and solo-wise, in the revised Dublin version of Alexander’s Feast.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
The Producers, Garrick Theatre review - Ve haf vays of makin...

Unexpectedly, there’s a sly reference to James Joyce’s Ulysses interpolated into Act One (in case we hadn’t caught the not...

Appl, Levickis, Wigmore Hall review - fun to the fore in cab...

Concerts at the Wigmore Hall offer many types of pleasure, but not...

Album: The Divine Comedy - Rainy Sunday Afternoon

Neil Hannon has been recording and touring as the Divine Comedy since 1989 and has tried a fair few flavours along the way, from chamber pop to...

Lammermuir Festival 2025, Part 2 review - from the soaringly...

My colleague Boyd Tonkin visited the Lammermuir Festival for the first time this year. His eyes and ears have been opened to its treasures, but...

Frances Wilson: Electric Spark - The Enigma of Muriel Spark...

How do you tell the story of a person’s mind? In the preface to Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, published this year by...

Blu-ray: The Sons of Great Bear

Westerns had long been popular with German cinema audiences, some of the most successful being early 1960s West German adaptations of novels by...

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues review - comedy rock band f...

That difficult second documentary – or if you will, “rockumentary” – seems to have been especially challenging for...

Tosca, Welsh National Opera review - a great company reduced...

So it’s come to this: WNO’s autumn season reduced to two operas, a Tosca borrowed from Opera North and a revival of their own Candide...