Image ¡Feliz Navidad! – Mexican Baroque Music for Christmas Kölner Akademie/Michael Alexander Willens (CPO)Two of the four composers featured in this effervescent anthology never set foot in early 18th century Mexico. However, printed copies of sacred works by the Madrid-based Francisco Corselli and José de Nebra did cross the Atlantic for liturgical use in newly built Mexican cathedrals. There’s some delectable music here, the works by Manuel de Sareumaya and Ignacio Jerusalem especially enjoyable. The Italian-born Jerusalem (1707- Read more ...

It seldom happens that you long to hear choral music not in a modern auditorium but some chilly, echoing cavern of a great Victorian town hall. But that thought did arise as a full-strength London Symphony Orchestra and its hundred-strong chorus crammed uncomfortably into every inch of the Barbican hall’s stage for Vaughan Williams’s Dona Nobis Pacem. It felt like squeezing a herd of elephants into a cake tin, and the Barbican’s disobliging acoustic hardly helped enrich the mood. Yet Antonio Pappano still managed to work the uplifting magic that he reliably brings to choral blockbusters Read more ...

As the new season opens, confidence is high at ENB, just as it should be given the roaring success of recent programmes featuring the latest work of iconoclast William Forsythe. His classical steps set to disco raised the roof.The company’s current mixed bill, R:Evolution, also contains some Forsythe, but within a more sober, even academic frame, the idea being to track the evolution of ballet across eight decades: from George Balanchine and Martha Graham – two distinct voices of the 1940s – to a Forsythe classic from 1992, to a grandly conceived new work from internationalist David Dawson. Read more ...

Pianist Bruce Liu wasn’t the only star soloist last night, though he certainly had the most notes to play. Attention was riveted by at least five Philharmonia members and their maverick principal conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali as percussionist in a joyful Prom.First off the mark was Antoine Siguré, probably the most compelling orchestral timpanist I’ve ever encountered. Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, daughter of two of Los Folkloristica’s founding members, gifted him solo rollickings which gave her Antrópolis the nature of a concerto, punctuated by snatches of music from Mexico City’s Read more ...

Tchaikovsky has precisely two operas in the standard repertoire (including The Queen of Spades, currently playing at Garsington), and readers who love those works might well be forgiven for wondering what happened to the other eight or nine. On the evidence of Grange Park’s Mazeppa, the answer might seem to be pure mischance.In David Pountney’s production it comes across as a powerful, moving, often inspired drama, if not without certain problems that Tchaikovsky might have addressed if he hadn’t had the disconcerting habit of falling in love with his own characters.At bottom, the work is a Read more ...

Recent events have prompted the assertion – understandable in Ukraine – that the idea of the Russian soul is a nationalist myth. This production reminded me that it isn’t, if only by telling us of what we’ve lost: the majority of those great Russian singers and conductors who lit up previous stagings of Tchaikovsky’s dark masterpiece.Though Jack Furness’s period-conscious concept – no violations pushed too far as in Stefan Herheim's Royal Opera horror – works beautifully with Tom Piper’s endlessly resourceful designs, Lizzie Powell’s lighting and Lucy Burge’s quirky choreography, the musical Read more ...

At the age of 83, Martha Argerich contains more personality in her little finger than many people do in their entire bodies.Her vigorous, technically dazzling delivery of Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto began before she even touched the piano. As the orchestra played the opening passage she wasn’t just swaying in time to the music, she was hunching forward for the diminuendos and mouthing “ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum” along to the dotted rhythms. She couldn’t wait to be part of the performance, and right from the crisp ornamentation of her first entry she was its life and soul.Argerich has Read more ...

It would be hard to find an antihero more anti than Eugene Onegin. The protagonist of Alexander Pushkin’s long verse novel of 1833 is a wrecker of lives. Charismatically handsome yet arrogant, cynical and bored, his effect on those who fall under his spell is toxic. And yet in the mid-1960s his story suggested itself as material for a ballet so luminous and compelling that it has outlived its choreographer by more than half a century.Undaunted by the existence of two famous operatic treatments, John Cranko – then director of Stuttgart Ballet – saw the potential for wordless drama in what was Read more ...

There was excellent music making in the Hallé concert in Manchester last night, and there was self-admitted “noise”. Briefly, the two coincided in one work.The outstanding music making of the evening came from pianist Giorgi Gigashvili, winner of the 2024-25 Terence Judd-Hallé Award, now fulfilling the opportunities that success gave him. Together with the orchestra and conductor Roderick Cox, he gave a beautiful and stylish performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 (in C major – the one they used to bill as “the Elvira Madigan concerto”, if your memory goes back that far).His playing was Read more ...

No new production of a beloved old ballet can please everyone, and there is none more beloved, or more frequently produced, than The Nutcracker. English National Ballet has staked its identity on performing Tchaikovsky’s last, most hummable and most festive ballet every Christmas since 1950, turning out a fresh reading every few years. This is quite feasible given that so little of the original 1892 production remains (the two pas de deux, the plot outline and the music, basically), leaving everything else up for grabs – a gift for designers and choreographers. The constant is Read more ...

A time must come again when British orchestras return to complete Tchaikovsky ballet scores in concert, as in the BBC glory days of the great Rozhdestvensky. We were halfway there with The Nutcracker's second act in Mark Wigglesworth’s second programme as the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s Chief Conductor. The "first act” was in any case a shimmering miracle too, a true partnership with another collegial master, Boris Giltburg, in Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto.Wigglesworth M – not to be confused with Ryan, who may well have improved since I last saw him in action – has by no means Read more ...

Emotional truth is elusive in Tchaikovsky’s “lyrical scenes” after Pushkin’s verse-novel. Overstress every feeling, as conductor Henrik Nánási did last night, and you leave some of us in the audience feeling manipulated. Play it cool, which is what we mostly get in Ted Huffman’s new production, and the heart is similarly untouched.There shouldn’t be a problem with modern dress – mostly stylish and colour-co-ordinated from costume designer Astrid Klein – even if here it doesn’t give us a sense of place (Hyemi Shin's grey stage leaves room only for a few props). That wouldn’t matter if the Read more ...