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 ...

For perhaps the most widely cheered orchestra on the planet, it doesn’t look like much of a concert venue. Fenced in with wire, flanked by a road which leads away to low-rise housing, a scrappy patch of scrubland stretches over a few nondescript acres. Indeed the only hint of anything to caress the eye is the looming silhouette of Stirling Castle on an adjacent promontory.It’s here nonetheless, in Raploch on Thursday 21 June, that The Big Concert will take place and, with three other events nationwide, officially open the London 2012 Festival. On a stage as sizeable as the one they rig up at Read more ...

At the Royal Albert Hall one summer evening in 2007, a teeming ensemble of young South Americans served up a BBC Prom that is the most YouTubed classical concert this side of the Three Tenors. Under the baton of the compelling Gustavo Dudamel, an all-dancing, all-shouting account of “Mambo” from West Side Story has become the roof-raising sign-off of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, who last year dropped the word Youth from their name.Still a mere 32, with the hair of a poet and the grin of a chipmunk, their conductor seems to be few critics’ idea of the finished Read more ...

 Britten: Serenade for tenor, horn and strings; Nocturne; Finzi: Dies Natalis Mark Padmore, Britten Sinfonia/Jacqueline Shave, with Stephen Bell (horn) (Harmonia Mundi)Britten’s Serenade and Nocturne are still indelibly associated with the voice of Peter Pears. His tenor, undeniably characterful, could never be described as a thing of beauty, and his 1960s recordings of both works show him sadly past his prime. Mark Padmore’s new recording is terrific - his voice is expressive, beautiful and terrifying by turns. Britten’s unique talent for word-setting deployed unnerving skill in the Read more ...

Zaha Hadid, visionary architect of the London Olympics Aquatic Centre, becomes a Dame and three new knights of the arts are created in the Queen's Jubilee Birthday Honours announced this morning. Actor Kenneth Branagh, long touted as Sir Laurence Olivier's heir in the classical tradition, becomes a Sir, as do Michael Boyd, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and opera director David McVicar.Kate Winslet becomes CBE, as do Sadler's Wells chief Alistair Spalding and composer Michael Berkeley and Harry Christophers, founder of the baroque vocal ensemble The Sixteen.Among the new Read more ...

We're extremely happy to have the first viewing of this beautiful video by Grammy-nominated director Eric Epstein for Hilary Hahn and Hauschka's “Draw a Map”. Its perhaps the most completely realised audio-visual summing up of the area of music that is becoming known as post-classical: that is, music that uses the techniques and instruments of the classical tradition but is not constrained by the classical world's commercial and social strictures.Watch "Draw a Map":Hauschka, aka Volker Bertelmann, is a composer and pianist whose music has always drawn on the techno and world music played in Read more ...

The repertoire of the OAE is creeping away from the 18th century and into the 20th with such unashamed eagerness, it wouldn't be at all surprising to see them throwing up an urtext edition of "Hit Me Baby One More Time" in a few seasons. Last night, we got 20th-century French impressionism, including a work that was premiered in 1933. Some might call this expansion into the last century bold. Others greedy. But in the hands of their guest conductor, Sir Simon Rattle, it's also never anything less than fascinating.Though it doesn't immediately tally on paper, the match-up made Read more ...

The new Ninth Symphony, from the pen of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, is something of a paradox.  It was commissioned by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and the Helskinki Philharmonic Orchestra and is dedicated to the Queen on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee. And yet it is a round condemnation of the nation’s interventions – called "disastrous" by the composer in his programme notes – in Iraq and Afghanistan.Quite how that sits in a work dedicated to Her Majesty who is, after all, Head of the Armed Services created some confusion in the minds of those attending its premiere. The Read more ...

To each their own Hay. The Roman encampment that is the modern-day literary festival, circled by pantechnicons and trending in the Twittersphere, looks very much like a monomaniacal content provider for all comers. Astroturf walkways deliver the cagouled hundreds and thousands to events in tents with clockwork regularity. But the reality is, of course, that no two experiences of Hay are alike. A bit like snowflakes.Talking of which, the one common denominator to every event in my two and half a days on site alluded in some shape or form to the weather. As the winds crack its cheeks outside, Read more ...

 Bach: Brandenburg Concertos, Sinfonias Orchestra of the Antipodes/Antony Walker, Anna MacDonald, Erin Helyard (ABC Classics)Exactly why this set, recorded in Sydney in 2003, has waited so long for a commercial release is a bit of a puzzle. These are fabulous performances in every sense. The playing is so vibrant, so alive that resistance is futile. Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos are as ubiquitous as Baroque music gets, but their familiarity shouldn’t hide their musical qualities. I loved Riccardo Chailly’s historically informed modern instrument versions, but these recordings Read more ...

It’s one thing for UK Border Control to turn Heathrow’s Arrivals into a giant theme-park queue, but it’s quite another when they start messing with our music. Paperwork issues yesterday saw one Japanese and two Korean members of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra denied entry to the UK, leaving Ton Koopman and his band too under-staffed to attempt their planned Brandenburg Concerto. Fortunately, soprano soloist Dorothee Mields stepped up with Bach’s Cantata BWV 199, giving us a rather more vocal, but no less Bach-centric evening of music to open this year’s Spitalfields Festival.One of the Read more ...

What an era for pianists it was in the four decades from 1800 to 1840, the era covered by Murray Perahia’s recital last night. Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert and Chopin all in full verdant flight, selected for a programme of much fantasy and dancing rhythms, in which the translucent, crystalline playing of the American found and told multiple stories.Perahia’s narrative imagination constantly strikes me - it’s the way that he can play a pair of phrases with utmost simplicity, and yet unearth within them a sense of rich thoughts or feelings following each other, mirroring the imagination itself Read more ...