Earlier this year, Steven Isserlis curated a revelatory Sheffield Chamber Music Festival spotlighting Saint-Saëns, with plentiful Fauré towards the end. Now it’s the younger composer’s turn, marking his death 100 years ago on 4 November 1924, but his mentor has more than a look-in over five concerts featuring six bright stars, "Team Fauré".Friday’s launch made us love Fauré even more, but also opened many ears to the early genius of Saint-Saëns. The programme, delivered to an audience dotted with familiar faces among musicians, was not quite as planned. Personable and wry as ever, Isserlis Read more ...

"I always enjoy seeing sunlight play on the rocks, the water, the trees and plains. What variety of effects, what brilliance and what softness... I wish my music could show as much diversity." Gabriel Fauré, who wrote those words and is indisputably one of the greatest of French composers, died 100 years ago, on 4 November 1924. His avowed aim was to elevate his listeners “as far as possible above what is.”In recent times of hardship, playing his music felt like a true gift, bringing solace to my heart. It is so moving and yet so comforting. No matter how profound, even dark, the emotions it Read more ...

Last time I saw the lovelorn Cyclops from Handel’s richly turbulent cantata, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, he was in a warehouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf earlier this year, posturing moodily as an Italian film director. The London Handel Festival’s specially commissioned Aci by the River seemed to have found the ideal form in which to explore this tale of thwarted desire for modern audiences; a dark tale of #MeToo woe in an alienated urban setting.Yet the ebullient, passionate performance delivered by La Nuova Musica at the Wigmore Hall last night proved that when it comes down to it, there’s simply Read more ...

Kahchun Wong’s third Bridgewater Hall concert with the Hallé in his inaugural season as principal conductor consisted of just one work: Bruckner’s Symphony no. 9 – but not in the incomplete three-movement version that until quite recently has been the norm in Manchester (and elsewhere).The story that only three of four planned movements were completed, with mere sketches for the last one being found at the composer’s death, was widely accepted, and when Cristian Mandeal performed and recorded it with the Hallé in 2007, and Ryan Wigglesworth played it with them in 2017, that was the version we Read more ...

What’s it like to be in the middle of an orchestra, hugger-mugger with the violas, looking directly over the flautist’s shoulder? Last night’s immersive concert by Sinfonia Smith Square gave the us the chance to find out, the players spread around Smith Square Hall on podiums, with the audience encouraged to wander round as the performance unfolded. It was at once a revealing but also somewhat frustrating experience.The hour-long programme explored the plight of the UK’s temperate rainforest. You may not (I didn’t) realise the UK had any temperate rainforest, but it does – and centuries ago Read more ...

 Schubert: Sonata in G major D. 894, Moments Musicaux D. 780, Fantasy in F minor D. 940 Maurizio Pollini, Daniele Pollini (pianos) (Deutsche Grammophon)What a superb cover image for the last recording by Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024). Pollini ‘père’ is seated at the piano, backlit. His son Daniele (b.1978) stands behind him, looking over his shoulder.  Cosimo Filippini’s photograph tells the story of this album so well. Pollini is in the role of the authoritative guide, as if teaching his son – and us listeners – lessons about this music. I can somehow imagine him repeating Paul Read more ...

In May, it was announced that Greater Manchester was to become the UK’s first Centre of Excellence for Music and Dementia, hosted by Manchester Camerata.The Centre is an incredible opportunity and the result of the vision and energy of many people, a place – Greater Manchester – which supports ambition and the belief that great art and social impact go hand in hand and that we should scale up, and an example of the power of music and our amazing musicians. Along the way two people in particular fired me up – Elsie, a figure from my childhood, and Graham Vick. Both sadly gone, but who’d both Read more ...

Every lover of folk-tales knows that the seeker has to endure dangers and setbacks before they finally win the prize. Last night, the ever-enterprising Aurora Orchestra played The Firebird – Stravinsky’s own musical vision of the intrepid hero who outwits the forces of darkness – on a unique site that presents an audience with its own kind of ordeals. Once the Tottenham IKEA, Drumsheds has undergone a metamorphosis from super-store to super-club.Set in a wilderness of concrete lots and wire fences, across a roaring highway, the big blue terminal-sized shed now offers 608,000 square feet of Read more ...

Last Monday my colleague Boyd Tonkin was delighted by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective’s playing at Hatfield House – and on Thursday it was my turn to be impressed by their colourful Wigmore Hall recital, which featured the marvellous clarinettist Carlos Ferreira in Bartók and Brahms.In Bartók’s Contrasts, Ferreira (pictured below) was following in the footsteps of Benny Goodman, who co-commissioned the piece in 1938. There are distinctively Goodmanesque moments in which Bartók channels the recently deceased George Gershwin, and Ferreira found a rich and resonant American accent for Read more ...

Christian Gerhaher, the most compelling and complete interpreter of German Lieder of our time, makes no secret of the fact that – unlike his devotion to, say, Schumann – his relationship with the songs of Brahms has never been comfortable.In a memoir published in 2015, he explained a “certain antipathy” towards the composer: the singer demurs from being cast in the role of a mere conduit for melody “like a viola”, He says he sometimes feels “under attack” from the words, and he is also very mistrustful of Brahms’s motives in espousing the German folk song idiom.And yet the result of all this Read more ...

A programme of less-loved siblings – Shostakovich’s gnarly Second Cello Concerto and Rachmaninov’s “not-the-Second” Symphony No. 1 – gave John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London the chance to do what they do best: force an audience to take a second look.The Shostakovich has benefitted over the past few years from the advocacy of Sheku Kanneh-Mason – an unexpected choice for a young cellist who stormed to victory at the BBC Young Musician competition in 2016 with the more obviously ingratiating Concerto No. 1, whose signature is singing warmth of tone and breadth of melodic line.There’s Read more ...

It’s not often that a classical music concert offers to take you beyond the stratosphere and back, but this intriguing evening from the City of London Sinfonia did precisely that with considerable élan. All too frequently there’s a considerable gap between a fantastic idea and its satisfying execution, yet this musical trip from the Antarctic to the Arctic via different cloud formations proved to be as stimulating as it was passionately engaging.That was due in no small part to the contribution of Dr Simon Clark (pictured below, far right), an atmospheric scientist who’s the author of a book Read more ...