Poised when I met him six weeks ago between 40th anniversary celebrations of  the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, of which he has been a shaping chief conductor for the past five years  and putting his new music directorship of Glyndebourne into action, Robin Ticciati hardly seemed like a man in positions of power, more an idealistic youth with a touch of the dreamer softening a powerful intellect.He was much the same, in short, as when I’d first encountered him sharing a 2009 Glyndebourne study day on Janáček's Jenůfa (Ticciati holding the score below) in the then-26 year old’s last Read more ...

Vladimir Jurowski is a master of the through-composed programme. Yet at first this looked like a more standard format: explosive contemporary work (if 1966 can still be called “contemporary”) followed by popular concerto and symphony. On reflection, though - and there was space enough for that - it turned out to be a back-to-front journey through German musical history, from Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s atom bomb of light to classical-romantic Beethoven and late-romantic Brahms ending in a homage to Bach The sequence of works was executed with the sometimes blinding clarity we’ve come to expect Read more ...

 Beethoven: Piano Concertos 2 and 4 Mahler Chamber Orchestra/Leif Ove Andsnes (piano and director) (Sony)You know that this will be good after just a few seconds; Beethoven's comically strait-laced opening gesture promptly answered by a smartly shaped orchestral tutti. Well-tuned winds and horns are perky, and string articulation is perfect. All so good that you're caught off guard when Leif Ove Andsnes makes his sly entrance and you remember that this is a piano concerto. The lightness of touch is intoxicating, Andsnes scaling down his sound so that he's a perfect match for a well- Read more ...

A voyage around Beethoven by Ives and John Adams, and then beyond him by Berlioz, added up to a vintage San Francisco Symphony programme from its music director Michael Tilson Thomas. Forty years on from his first concert with SFS, he’s still youthful in demeanour, still flapping with seagull (or albatross) like flamboyancy. But is there a chill behind the showmanship? I ended up feeling that way despite what should have been the ultimate cataclysm of the Frenchman’s concluding infernal orgy.The sound of the orchestra is still sleek and bright. That paid dividends in a Bruckner concert I Read more ...

It’s the thought that counts. That’s what we say about presents. But when the gift is a song by Richard Strauss it is that and more. He made a habit of gifting songs, particularly to his wife Pauline. Several of  the Six Orchestral Songs on offer here, as the two-month Strauss’s Voice series marking the 150th anniversary of his birth nears its end, are taken from groups originally celebrating occasions such as their wedding day (10 September 1896).It was Sir Mark Elder’s turn to step up for his first appearance in the series, and he drew some glorious sound from the Hallé, while being Read more ...

 Beethoven: The Symphonies (And Reflections by Kancheli, Mochizuki, Šerkšnytė, Shchedrin, Staud, Widmann) Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Mariss Jansons (BR Klassik)When you've a full size modern orchestra performing Beethoven symphonies, there's the worry that everything will sound too easy. Riccardo Chailly's life-enhancing 2011 Leipzig set achieved miracles thanks to lightning speeds and razor-sharp articulation. Mariss Jansons' Bavarian Radio players make an even more sumptuous noise than Chailly's Gewandhausorchester and they could, presumably, perform each of these symphonies on Read more ...

This is more an excuse for celebration than a review. Six years after the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1974 – the birth year we were marking last night – I rolled up in a foggy Edinburgh one February day and chose it as my alma mater on the strength especially of one concert which showed what musical life in the city might be like: trumpeter John Wilbraham playing Bach and Handel with the SCO under Roderick Brydon. I fell in love with the venue, the Queen’s Hall, as much as the orchestra. In 1982 I proudly took on the role of the SCO’s student publicity officer. It’s a Read more ...

 Beethoven: Diabelli Variations, Sonata no 32, Bagatelles András Schiff (piano and fortepiano) (ECM)Invest in a copy of Jeremy Denk's zingy new Goldberg Variations and you'll hopefully be prompted to purchase this rather special András Schiff Beethoven disc – or discs, as he gives us two performances of the Diabelli Variations – one on a velvet-toned 1921 Bechstein once used by Wilhelm Backhaus, and the second on a Franz Brodmann fortepiano built a century earlier. Schiff asks us to wonder whether Beethoven would have liked the Steinway, suggesting that the composer's response might be “ Read more ...

In the listening room of Grieg Hall, Bergen, a concert hall sometimes masquerading as a theatre and vice versa, I talk to Mary Miller, director of Bergen National Opera, and Andrew Litton, music director of the venerable Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra - about the genesis of opera in Bergen and the prospect of the big autumn production - Beethoven’s cry for freedom and political tolerance, Fidelio - which will serve as an upbeat to the 200th anniversary of the establishment of Norway’s constitution in 2014.Miller talks about the creative freedom of an opera company which is project specific and Read more ...

Calixto Bieito’s fantasia on Fidelio may be lording it on the other side of the Thames but Orchestra Mozart, on its first-ever visit to London, was happy to place its trust in what Beethoven actually wrote. As if to prove that wild-child provocateurs don’t own the playground, traditions were reaffirmed at the Royal Festival Hall last night in this urbane and civilised concert led by two of music’s grown-ups, Maria João Pires and Bernard Haitink – late-notice super-subs for the advertised but dually indisposed Martha Argerich and Claudio Abbado. The Bologna-based band is evidently formed of Read more ...

The first words we hear don’t belong to Fidelio at all. The first music does, but not at all where you expect to find it. If you’ve read your programme (and who does before the show begins?) you’ll find a poem entitled “Labyrinth” by Jorge Luis Borges from a collection In Praise of Darkness. So there’s the thinking behind the amazing image we see before us (designer Rebecca Ringst) - a neon-edged framework of shifting metallic chambers, a vertical maze with no apparent way in or way out. And then Edward Gardner throws down the first sepulchral chord of Beethoven’s Leonore No 3 Overture ( Read more ...

May I be permitted a rude, opinionated intermezzo between reflections on Vasily Petrenko’s two Oslo Philharmonic Proms, and before Marin Alsop steps up to great expectations for the Last Night? Here’s another Russian in trouble, not for keeping mum on what ought to be said about Putin’s steps too far (Gergiev and Netrebko), but for talking inflammatory nonsense about women conductors – as opposed to harmless nonsense about conductors in general (the violinist who likes to be known as Kennedy, who we can only hope was also speaking nonsense about a possibly fraudulent vote for MP Glenda Read more ...