It was, without doubt, a moment unlike any witnessed in Fabric’s history of just over quarter of a century. Hundreds of us crammed into the superclub seen worldwide as an icon of underground electronic music culture and listened in silence as Jack Bazalgette, co-founder of Through The Noise, read a description of the conditions in which Messiaen composed Quartet for the End of Time. For many in this unconventional classical music crowd, it would have been the first time they had heard about how Messiaen – who was captured by the Germans in World War II after serving as a medic in the Read more ...

For the final concert in their 80th birthday season, the Philharmonia swept us into the great outdoors. Three works imbued with the forces of nature made up a sort of musical sandwich, with a novel central filling flanked by more familiar, and comfortingly nutritious, outer layers. The surprise flavours in the middle arrived in the form of the UK premiere of the Mother Earth piano concerto performed by its composer: the maverick, prolific Turkish pianist Fazil Say. Hearty but well-baked fare before and after was supplied by Sibelius’s tone-poem En Saga and Dvořák’s bucolic Eighth Read more ...

Since 1981 Ryedale Festival has presented a mouthwatering array of concerts in picturesque churches and glorious stately homes in North East Yorkshire, characterised by interval drinks and picnics in lovely gardens or sunny terraces on long summer evenings. This year it took a short, sharp dive into a very different seasonal atmosphere, presenting its first Winter Weekend from 21 to 23 November, with just four events in the charming market towns of Pickering, Malton and Norton.Pianist Ethan Loch, who won the keyboard final of BBC Young Musician in 2022, set the scene in his opening recital on Read more ...

Even top conductors can have difficulty with Elgar’s late romantic suppleness. Vasily Petrenko of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Santtu-Mattias Rouvali of the Philharmonia have made a heavy meal out of the “Concert Overture” (= symphonic poem) In the South (Alassio). Not Edward Gardner with his London Philharmonic players, strings on top, glowing form, woodwind hyper-sensitive, in a perfectly paced journey of a soul.Elgar took his melancholic as well as his boisterous side on holiday in Italy. Gardner’s trajectory was one of restlessness and unease eventually erupting in a vision of Read more ...

Bah-humbuggers like me are happy to pass over seasonal fare, maybe excepting a Messiah or Christmas Oratorio, and look ahead to the birds that sing in the spring. That was the theme for this light-of-touch rattlebag, with versatile top quality on display from all performers.Maybe parts of it smacked of a tantalising taster menu. Violinist Braimah Kanneh-Mason came on at the start, advertised only through the first of Fantasia mover and shaker Tom Fetherstonhaugh’s short speeches, to twitter with leader Millie Ashton in the opening Allegro of Vivaldi’s “Spring” Concerto - so fresh and buoyant Read more ...

Britten was less in the Weekend than the annual title suggested, however significant and striking the works: a singular song cycle, an anguished early viola solo transcribed for cello and a minute-long final sketch. His influence was strong, it’s true, in unforgettable inspirations by Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Philip Moore. Their texts, by Ian McMillan and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, declared the real connection in two of the finest small-scale concerts I’ve heard this year: remembrance. Because it was this, white-poppied as well as red, which threaded the deep thinking and feeling, and brought Read more ...

Elena Schwarz was back in Manchester to conduct the BBC Philharmonic only just over two weeks since her visit to the Hallé, and again conducting some mainstream heavyweight works in which her clarity of beat and fresh approach brought rich rewards. She showed in her debut concert with the Philharmonic in 2021 and a repeat visit the following year that she can handle new music with equal assurance, and the central work in this programme was a relatively novel one: Dani Howard’s Trombone Concerto, written for and again this time performed by Peter Moore. Written during the Covid shut-down, it Read more ...

To St James’s Piccadilly to hear the young pianist Misha Kaploukhii give an impressive performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, accompanied by the Greenwich Chamber Orchestra. Kaploukhii is a rising star, a postgraduate at the Royal College of Music where he recently won the Concerto Competition, and I enjoyed his reading of a favourite concerto of mine.And although he isn’t yet the finished article – as I’m sure he himself would admit – he is certainly a pianist I will be keeping my eye on. The Fourth Concerto starts with a Beethovenian novelty, the piano alone playing a chordal Read more ...

Robin Holloway is a composer and, until his retirement in 2011, don at Cambridge, where he taught many of the leading British composers of the last half-century. He has also always written on music, including a long-standing column in The Spectator, previously publishing two collections of “essays and diversions” (which I confess I haven’t read).Now comes his summa, Music’s Odyssey: An Invitation to Western Classical Music, styled as “an invitation to western classical music”. The first thing to say is: it’s very long. Indeed, the proof copy of 1,216 pages didn’t fit through my letterbox Read more ...

 Bliss: Miracle in the Gorbals, Metamorphic Variations BBC Philharmonic/Michael Seal (Chandos)We are coming towards the end of the year marking 50 years since the death of Arthur Bliss, and I’m pleased to have covered a number of live performances and recordings that have exposed some underexposed music. The latest of these is a recording pairing his ballet Miracle in the Gorbals, a big success in its time, and the expansive Metamorphic Variations, played by the BBC Philharmonic under Michael Seal.This was Bliss’s 1944 follow-up to his hit ballet Checkmate of 1937. Where the latter was a Read more ...

Would it be possible to get to the end of the year without hearing a single Bruckner symphony live? I’d reckoned without the presence in Dublin of fabulous conductor Anja Bihlmaier, whose 2022 concert with the National Symphony of Ireland was a fine introduction to the thriving concert scene here, and of Boris Giltburg, one of the most engaging living pianists, in Mozart (and a far from insubstantial Schumann encore). Besides, Bruckner’s Ninth gives the lie more than any of the others to any settled spirituality or faith. Here the smoke-into-fire coda of the first movement and the Read more ...

Zum Roten Igel – the “Red Hedgehog Tavern” – was a concert venue with pub attached in 19th century Vienna, frequented by the like of Schubert and Brahms. It is also the name of an ensemble committed to exploring the connections between these “classical” composers and the Volkisch music that would have been heard in the next-door room. In this case it means re-scoring Schubert’s String Quintet and garlanding it with wild interstitial dance jams, recreating an imaginary historical mash-up.It is a Marmite project, with a full Purcell Room seeing several people leave during proceedings Read more ...