By the time she went to college to study to become a singing teacher, Joyce DiDonato had been to exactly two different American states: Kansas and Colorado. New York and San Francisco were as yet unvisited, Europe and Asia as yet undreamed of. It’s a story DiDonato herself tells with practised humour. Jump forward 20 years and there isn’t a continent or metropolitan hub unconquered by this supreme mezzo-soprano, whose career may have taken her impossibly far from her Kansas beginnings, but whose sunny, unpretentious workmanship is still pure Midwest.Last night at the Wigmore Hall it was Read more ...

 Debussy: Préludes, Trois Nocturnes Prélude à l’après-midi d’une faune Alexei Lubimov (with Alexei Zuev) (ECM)Historically informed readings of 20th-century music no longer surprise us; Simon Rattle has recently performed La Mer on period instruments and the quest for authenticity continues to advance forward chronologically. Pianist Alexei Lubimov’s Debussy Préludes are played on a restored 1925 Bechstein and a Steinway built in 1913; it’s a surprise to read that Debussy, unlike Ravel and Fauré, preferred a warmer, German sound to the more translucent, lighter tone of pianos by Pleyel Read more ...

For the general public, getting to see the Mansion House in the City of London is almost as easy a task as becoming a dentist who specialises in hen’s teeth. But that was not the only reason for coming along to last night’s Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s concert conducted by Edward Gardner. For this City of London Festival programme contained a most teasing prospect. Alina Ibragimova, the most questing and lively young violinist of our time, was actually going to play a repertoire concerto.Left to her own devices, this 26-year-old firecracker would probably be happier unleashing a Read more ...

This Friday afternoon at five o’clock, the National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke will recite a new poem and initiate a seismic week of Welsh cultural exploration. The inaugural Dinefwr Literary Festival will bring writers and musicians from Wales and beyond to a National Trust house and park in Carmarthenshire. Unlike other literary festivals in Wales – notably Hay and Laugharne – this one will straddle the border between English and Welsh. Joining Clarke on the list of performers is not only the former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion but his Welsh-language equivalent, the current Archdruid of Read more ...

Standing ovations. Spontaneous genuflections. A we-can-change-the-world lecture. This must be what's it like to live in a Communist state. Funnily enough, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, who we were saying goodbye to last night in the final concert of their four-day Southbank residency, already do. I'm not a supporter of El Sistema, the body which gave birth to this youth orchestra. I'm amazed anyone thinks that an educational organisation set up to impose the Western classical canon on street kids in Venezuela (and now Scotland) because it's somehow supposed to miraculously make Read more ...

The Arts Desk has been voted Specialist Journalism Site of 2012 at the Online Media Awards. In a celebratory dinner at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium recognising "the best and boldest of online news-based creativity and also the most original", The Guardian were the major winners with five awards, but even their new Data Store section was outgunned in the Specialist Journalism category by The Arts Desk.In a category contested by 11 nominees, The Arts Desk's prize was the first of two given by the judges acclaiming two specialist sites "for very different reasons" - the other went to The Economist Read more ...

Twenty young conductors have been shortlisted to compete in the Donatella Flick/London Symphony Orchestra Conducting Competition in late September. The top prize is a cash award of £15,000 and an attachment to the LSO as Assistant Conductor.The 20 comprise four from the UK - Joolz Gale, Ben Gernon, Jonathan Lo and Gemma New - Irishmen Daniel Stewart and Robert Tuohy, three from Spain, two each from Italy, France, Greece and Germany, a Hungarian, an Austrian and a Portuguese.They were chosen from 187 applicants from EU countries via videos they submitted. They will be whittled down to 10, and Read more ...

 Beethoven: Sonata no 32, Ligeti Études Books 1 and 2 Jeremy Denk (Nonesuch)The word Études conjures negative associations for musicians. They’re studies. Which suggests endless practice. As New York-based Jeremy Denk says in his notes, they’re pieces which can crush a child’s enthusiasm for music. “You can imagine zoning out, lulled by the drudgery, modulating up and down until you fell off the keyboard.” Eccentric Hungarian modernist György Ligeti composed 18 Études for piano in three volumes, and they’re all great. Your ears are twisted, challenged but always entertained. And the Read more ...

There are of course no superlatives left when it comes to these Venezuelans. And yet last night called on those witnessing the al fresco performance of the  Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra to root around in the store cupboard for a couple more. Coldest midsummer night ever experienced by a South American? No that won’t be it. Wettest? Neither. Most tumultuous celebration of the centrality of music in all our lives to take place in a Scottish field? Certainly.This opening night of the London 2012 Festival – the event was marked elsewhere all over the country, but this was the one on BBC Read more ...

At his studio near White City in West London (he did say it was Notting Hill) Ilan Eshkeri’s is adding a scratchy cello to a key moment in Ralph Fiennes film of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. It’s the moment the inhabitants of Rome realise that Coriolanus, an exile, is about to attack them. It is, he says of the suitably ominous sound, “bent out of tune, weird – I’m getting into the sounds of breathing, I like a lot of dirt.” In the studio is his producer Steve McLaughlin, and there are a couple of assistants bustling around.Although not (yet, anyway) a household name, it’s a fair bet that you Read more ...

Just as the most impeccably aristocratic families have the shabbiest homes, so the oldest and most prestigious orchestras frequently deliver the most scrappy performances. Trying too hard is so arriviste. King of this insouciant shabby chic are the Vienna Philharmonic. It's almost as if at some point the orchestra got bored of playing well. One hundred and sixty years at the top delivering the world's warmest, plushest, most sophisticated sound must get repetitive. That's not to say that we didn't get some glorious Viennese cream. We did. But we also got a deliberate untidiness that Read more ...

The exceptionally moving and heartwarming story of more than 10,000 mostly Jewish children being brought to the safe haven of these shores between December 1938 and September 1939 to rescue them from being victims of the Holocaust, Kindertransport, has oft been told. But now we hear it afresh through the voices of children in a dramatised re-telling. The coincidence of composer Carl Davis’s interest in this extraordinary experience and the Halle’s desire to commission new work for their children’s choir has resulted in Last Train to Tomorrow.“I wanted to focus on the journey before the Read more ...