So the bubble of reactionary brouhaha over the Last Night of the Proms quickly burst: there can be no argument about singing “Land of Hope and Glory” or “Rule, Britannia!” when they’re to be presented in their original Proms forms (Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, where the tune preceded the words the composer so disliked, and Henry Wood’s 1905 Fantasia on British Sea Songs, all orchestral – only later did Malcolm Sargent rearrange the closing anthem to go with a solo voice). Apart from the death threats to conductor Dalia Stasevska and her family, what’s most lamentable is that Read more ...

 Beethoven: Symphonies 1-9 Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/William Steinberg (DG)Cologne-born Hans Wilhem Steinberg was a youthful Music Director of the Frankfurt Opera in the early 1930s. He was relieved of his role, mid-rehearsal, in 1933, owing to his Jewish background. After a spell with the Palestine Symphony Orchestra he arrived in New York, initially as Toscanini’s assistant at NBC. A naturalised US citizen from 1944, he anglicised his name to William and secured the directorship of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1952, remaining there until 1976. A few of Steinberg’s Read more ...

As two weeks of livestreamed Proms begin tonight, we just want to be there in the Royal Albert Hall. The exuberance of our lead picture tells one story of a Prom which had to be witnessed live to be believed: the annual visit of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain last year, with brilliant Auerbach and Prokofiev under Mark Wigglesworth, and much-loved Nicola Benedetti uniting with them in Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto.Chris Christodoulou is always in a unique position, usually putting his camera unnoticed through the velvet curtains at the top of various sets of stairs to the Albert Read more ...

What a difference a year makes. Live Proms will be back from Friday, but the very essence of the world's biggest music festival will be missing: the audience, and especially the Prommers whose rapt attention while standing has taken so many visiting orchestras by surprise. No doubt the rapport between conductor and players will be electric at times, but the third point of what Britten called the "magic triangle" of composer, performers and audience will be notable by its absence.Even so, the peerless Chris Christodoulou will be there to capture the essence of performance in action. Read more ...

 Bach Sean Shibe (guitar) (Delphian)The lute was mostly used as a continuo instrument during Bach’s lifetime though he did compose a small number of solo lute works. They were written using two-stave keyboard notation rather than traditional lute tablature, prompting speculation that they were actually meant for the lute-harpsichord, its gut strings making for a softer, mellower sound. Sean Shibe opts for a six-string modern guitar on this disc, and it’s hard to imagine these pieces performed any other way. The Lute Suite in E minor is the earliest of Bach’s solo lute pieces, its six Read more ...

Birmingham emerged from musical lockdown with Stockhausen. It couldn’t have been anyone else, really. There’s something about Stockhausen’s fusion of modernity and goofy intergalactic romanticism that clearly strikes a chord in the Second City, where the last three decades of music have been measured out in landmark Stockhausen performances: Rattle’s CBSO performances of Gruppen, Birmingham Opera Company’s astonishing 2012 world premiere of Mittwoch aus Licht, and, in 1992, a massive open-air performance of Sternklang in Cannon Hill Park, under the direction of Stockhausen himself.In Read more ...

If it all comes across as vividly as this on screen, imagine what it would have been like to witness in person. Which quite a few of us very nearly did, until we had to be disinvited owing to changed government guidelines. Hopefully the move back to reopening of concert halls will admit us in limited numbers to the Wigmore Hall in September, and what a feast it is from this pioneering set-up: 100 events planned up to 22 December, all to be livestreamed (the qualification being that they really ought to charge a small amount for viewing; everything for free makes it hard on smaller outfits Read more ...

Before the not-quite-clear all-clear was given for distanced performances indoors, Bold Tendencies already had the perfect summer solution in the floor space beneath its rooftop terrace in Peckham’s former multi-storey car park. Never was its covering more needed than on Saturday night, when the perfect storms, apocalypses and incantations of pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy in Messiaen’s gobsmacking Visions de l’Amen gradually magicked away the torrential rain beyond and the city skyline slowly came into focus again.Nothing in all this, for me, quite matches the God-in-everything Read more ...

 Debussy: Images, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune Hallé/Sir Mark Elder (Hallé)That Debussy used the Geordie folksong The Keel Row in the first of his three Images for Orchestra is well known, and careful listening makes one realise that he never quotes it in full. The tune is mostly just hinted at, dotted rhythms and modal harmonies implying a grey Tyneside setting. Debussy’s original title was Gigues Tristes, though the melancholy is softened with wry humour. Mark Elder’s Hallé performance is immaculate, the orchestra’s augmented percussion section shining. You notice them again in Read more ...

Composer Gian-Carlo Menotti once asked rhetorically what society wanted of performing artists – “the bread of life or the after-dinner mint?” There were a couple of audience members last night – unique in my experience so far of the Fidelio Orchestra Café’s set-up – who clearly wanted pianist Charles Owen’s recital to be the pre-dinner amuse-bouche; one was reading a book from the start, another came down from upstairs during the music to demand a bottle of wine. But generally the small groups of attendees have relished what we’ve had on every musical programme, from Isserlis via Ibragimova Read more ...

Lockdown, perhaps more than any other time, has amplified how modern technology can be both a blessing and a curse. Of course, it’s wonderful to have the means to connect with friends and family scattered across the globe; carry on working, learning, eating, praying etc. with others; and enjoy art in new and innovative ways, such as this particular digital series. But how many of us have felt the exhaustion that comes from back to back zoom meetings, the ennui that comes from barely leaving our homes and the self doubt that comes from others’ social media streams? (Does my garden look as nice Read more ...

 William Dawson: Negro Folk Symphony, Ulysses Kay: Fantasy Variations, Umbrian Scene ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra/Arthur Fagen (Naxos)William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony was, briefly, a roaring success after Leopold Stokowski gave the first performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934, and it should have made Dawson a household name. Instead, he returned to his teaching post at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, heading its School of Music until retiring in 1955. Dawson continued to compose and arrange spirituals and achieving recognition as a choral conductor, and that Read more ...