mon 31/03/2025

Classical music

Batsashvili, Hallé, Wong, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - a star in the piano universe

Mariam Batsashvili, the young virtuosa pianist from Georgia, is a star. No doubt about that. Trained at the Liszt Academy in Weimar and winner of the International Franz Liszt Competition for Young Pianists in that city in 2015, she should know...

Read more...

Biss, National Symphony Orchestra, Kuokman, NCH Dublin review - full house goes wild for vivid epics

On paper, it was a standard programme with no stars to explain how this came to be a sellout concert. But packed it was, an audience of all ages which sat with concentrated awe through the spellbinding slow movement of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto...

Read more...

Verdi Requiem, Philharmonia, Muti, RFH review - new sparks from an old flame

Forget, for a moment, the legend and the lustre. If you knew nothing about Riccardo Muti’s half-century of history with Verdi’s Messa da Requiem for the writer-patriot Alessandro Manzoni – he first gave it with the Philharmonia back in 1974 – and...

Read more...

Naumov, SCO, Egarr, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh review - orchestral magic rescues some punishing music

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has had to put up with its fair share of artist cancellations over the last month, and the ensuing games of musical chairs led to the somewhat implausible scenario of this concert, where Richard Egarr, a conductor more...

Read more...

Classical CDs: Shipping lines, sabre dances and sea lice

 Donizetti: Songs Vols. 3 & 4 Michael Spyres (tenor), Carlo Rizzi (piano) – Vol. 3, Marie-Nicole Lemieux (mezzo-soprano), Giulio Zappa (piano) – Vol. 4. (Opera Rara)“The songs Donizetti poured forth during his composing career have [..]...

Read more...

Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, Irish Baroque Orchestra, Whelan, St George’s Hanover Square review - Handel’s journey of a soul

Imagine if Bach had set Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili’s allegory of Beauty breaking free from Pleasure with the guidance of Time and Enlightenment: he’d probably have hit the spiritual highs. The 21-year-old Handel, at least as this multifaceted...

Read more...

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Marsalis, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - sounds above substance

Few symphonies lasting over an hour hold the attention (Mahler’s can; even Messiaen’s Turangalîla feels two movements too long). Wynton Marsalis is a great man, but his Fourth, “The Jungle”, is no masterpiece, not even a symphony – a dance suite,...

Read more...

Uproar, Rafferty, Royal Welsh College, Cardiff review - colourful new inventions inspired by Ligeti

There’s a lot to be said for the planning that clearly went into this concert by the Cardiff-based new music ensemble, Uproar. Starting with Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto, it added three new commissions for (more or less) the same band and a fourth,...

Read more...

Attacca Quartet, Kings Place review - bridging the centuries in sound

Memorably described by Gramophone magazine as the “new kids on the classical block…with lavish pocket money”, Apple’s London-based label Platoon is busy cementing its street cred with an ongoing concert series at Kings Place.If BIS (bought by Apple...

Read more...

Manchester Collective, RNCM review - exploring new territory

Manchester Collective, now very much a part of the establishment world of new music, are still enlarging their territory. For this set, performed in Leeds and Manchester and repeated in Liverpool, Nottingham and the Southbank Centre, they are...

Read more...

Bavouzet, BBCSO, Stasevska, Barbican review - ardent souls in mythic magic

Not to be overshadowed by the adrenalin charges of the Budapest Festival Orchestra the previous evening, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its Principal Guest Conductor Dalia Stasevska gave a supercharged triple whammy of masterpieces. They even had a...

Read more...

Levit, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer, RFH review - anger unleashed, fantasy finessed in Prokofiev

A showstopper for starters followed by dark depths, a quirky compilation after the interval: it’s what you might expect from Iván Fischer and his 42-year-old Budapest Festival Orchestra. All Prokofiev, too: the sort of thing we used to get from...

Read more...
Subscribe to Classical music