Bernard Haitink is one of the great Bruckner conductors of our time. His interpretations are expansive yet vivid and always go straight to the heart of the music. But he is also an old man, and physical frailty is increasingly inhibiting his work, reducing the spontaneity of his communication with the orchestra. The results are both frustrating and inspiring, with details lost and clarity of texture often compromised. But he still has a firm grasp of the bigger picture, making this performance of the Te Deum and the Ninth Symphony continually compelling, for all its flaws.The Te Deum is often Read more ...

 Ståle Kleiberg: Mass for Modern Man Trondheim Symphony Orchestra and Choir/Eivind Gulberg Jensen (2L)There's a reference in the sleeve notes to Norwegian composer Ståle Kleiberg’s use of “a highly distinctive form of extended tonality.” Exactly what this entails is not spelt out. His music, at least on the basis of this release, is tonal and approachable without sounding glib or facile. This Mass for Modern Man follows a now familiar template of mixing chunks of the Latin mass with contemporary texts. A restrained, austere Kyrie eleison precedes the first of poet Jessica Gordon’s Read more ...

This was a very fine concert indeed, plus a lot more. The first half was a very carefully planned series of unveilings around the theme of Béla Bartók and Hungarian folk music, the second an overwhelming performance of his Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.The evening started with conductor Iván Fischer evoking the crucial incident in Béla Bartók’s life when, newly graduated as pianist and composer, he was mesmerised by the folk singing of Lidi Dósa, a peasant girl from Gerlice. It was that experience which led him to head off to the villages of Hungary and Transylvania with Zoltán Kodály to Read more ...

John Joubert: Jane Eyre April Frederick, David Stout, English Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Woods (Somm)This is the second Brontë opera to have come my way in the past year; Carlisle Floyd’s Wuthering Heights is now joined by this involving adaptation of Jane Eyre, composed between 1987 and 1997 by John Joubert, born in South Africa but a British resident since 1946. He's still musically active, and this live recording was made at a performance given in Birmingham last October, now released to celebrate Joubert’s 90th birthday. An extended interview included as a bonus on the second disc is Read more ...

It could have been your standard Russian touring programme: Tchaikovsky ballet music as hors d'oeuvre, Rachmaninov piano concerto, Shostakovich symphony. But the symphony was hardly the usual (Sixth rather than Fifth or Tenth). And any chance should be taken to hear London-born Freddy Kempf, a phenomenal artist incapable of playing a routine phrase, on his relatively rare visits to his native city.Kempf is a pianist in a million. At first you may wonder if the bucking and circling around the keyboard is absolutely necessary. But it produces the sound: the deep staccatos which highlight only Read more ...

On paper this was a knockout concert: Gramophone Award-winning Belgian ensemble Vox Luminis teaming up with the wonderfully gutsy Freiburg Baroque Consort to perform Monteverdi’s Vespers in the composer’s 450th anniversary year – one of the highlights of this year’s London Festival of Baroque Music. It may even be a wonderful concert when it is broadcast tonight on Radio 3, thanks to some skilful miking and the alchemy of the recording process. But in St John’s Smith Square last night it just wasn’t.It’s hard to know quite where the problem lay. Vocal forces of just 13 and an orchestra of Read more ...

Eisler: Hangmen Also Die and other film scores Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin/Johannes Kalitzke (Capriccio)Holed up in Los Angeles, Schoenberg never wrote a Hollywood film score. Unlike his pupil and fellow exile Hanns Eisler, whose music for Fritz Lang’s 1944 film Hangmen Also Die (with a screenplay by Brecht) was nominated for an Oscar. What was used in the film totals barely 15 minutes, but it’s vintage Eisler, a pragmatic, practical blend of late-romanticism and strict dodecaphony. The Main Title and a brief Love Scene are ripely enjoyable cheese; far more striking are a very Bergian Read more ...

Enlightenment is a wonderful idea, and the members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment who played Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall last night brought the wisdom of today’s period instrument movement to bear on music that most would see as belonging to the age of the pre-Enlightenment. Present-day enlightenment lies not just in historical accuracy, however, but also – from an audience point of view – in catching the spirit of its original creators.The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment do that extremely well. The expertise of their techniques is Read more ...

It’s been said – and with some justification – that John Wilson’s own Orchestra has the finest-sounding string section in the world today. What’s certain is that when Wilson guests with other orchestras, he transforms their string sound. It’s not merely the unselfconscious touches of period style – those perfectly gauged expressive slides – and nor is it just the unforced luminosity: how the surface sheen seems to be lit from within. It’s the phrasing, too: the sense of space that Wilson can generate around a melody, the way fast passages never feel hurried and slow passages have room to Read more ...

Few young singers make a UK recital debut like Lise Davidsen’s. But then, few singers come to that debut with such a weight of reputation and expectation. Taking not only the First Prize but also the Audience Prize and Birgit Nilsson Awards at 2015’s Operalia competition, established the then 28-year-old Norwegian soprano as one to watch. Two years on and Davidsen is sounding better than ever, poised on the brink of a major international career, with debuts at the Teatro Real, Covent Garden, Aix-en-Provence and the Wiener Staatsoper in the diary.This Rosenblatt recital at Wigmore Hall Read more ...

Has Glasgow’s Tectonics weekend turned away from its wilder excess? Has it, in its fifth outing, even – well, grown up and got serious? That was partly the sense from the opening day of conductor Ilan Volkov’s visionary mix of contemporary classical, rock, folk, jazz, electronica, and all the uncategorisable hinterlands in between them, a concept that he kicked off in Reykjavík and which he’s now delivered all over the globe. In Glasgow’s previous offerings, we’ve had works directed from a kids’ sandpit, foley artists making music from scrunching packets of dried pasta and flicking through Read more ...

Made from girders, say the brewers of an infamous Scottish fizzy drink. If you could siphon the music of Edgard Varèse into a can, that’s what it would taste like. Blunt, acrid, inimitable, fizzing with closely guarded, possibly unpleasant ingredients. The danger was that exposure to his entire output in one day would prove no more palatable than chugging through a two-litre bottle of Irn-Bru.Thanks to some sensitive programming and superbly prepared performances, however, the BBC’s “Total Immersion Day” did not entail saturation. Instead, the indomitable strength of a personality, and a Read more ...