Wonderful as the livestreamed Proms are for players working together again and for viewers/listeners who wouldn’t be able to get to the Royal Albert Hall even if they could be admitted, I’d sacrifice them all for one evening of live musical communication like this. There’s nothing like late Mozart in serene mode to make you feel connected to your surroundings, at one with a world in which everything seems completely right, especially on a sunny evening with the first hint of autumn in it; from the first bars of the Quartet in B flat, K589, led by Alex Redington's supremely cultured melodic Read more ...

After the success of BBC Radio 3’s live lunchtime broadcasts from the Wigmore Hall, live music is now kicking off again north of the border, with four concerts broadcast from City Halls, Glasgow, presented by Kate Molleson. Sadly, due to "unforeseen circumstances" the recitals were not filmed and streamed as originally planned – something which does take away from the overall audience experience – but it’s still thrilling to know that City Halls is once again ringing with music.Starting the series was a recital from the young Glasgow-born bass-baritone Michael Mofidian and pianist Julia Lynch Read more ...

No happy family, surely, was ever quite like this one. Love and mutual respect bound up with music-making at the highest level make the Kanneh-Masons of Nottingham a role-model for this country in times of trouble, with their reiterated message that music is for everyone, something to be shared at every level. Tellingly, it isn’t “Sheku and his siblings” – that's been done brilliantly in a previous documentary – but a whole roster of successful and potentially successful performers among whom it happens to be the cellist who’s made it big. And it doesn’t look as if his modesty and intense Read more ...

After a devastating drought, even a light shower can feel like something of a miracle. Under normal circumstances, a 60 minute lunchtime piano recital from the Wigmore Hall would represent wholly unremarkable business as usual for BBC Radio 3. As it was – coming (as the presenter Andrew McGregor reminded us) eleven weeks after the Wigmore had last heard live music – this felt like an event of profound significance. Perhaps that’s no bad thing. Perhaps we haven’t always listened to artists as life-affirming as Stephen Hough, and music as great as his opening programme of Bach and Schumann, as Read more ...

This is as close as we’re going to come now to the real festival experience. The enviably well-funded Bergen International Festival is serving up on average three or four events a day, livestreamed from atmospheric venues around the city and all available for a month. For those of us lucky to have witnessed the more intimate strand within the international programme curated by great pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, teaming up this year with outstanding soprano Mari Eriksmoen and young players from the (also well-funded) Crescendo mentoring programme, it was close to teleportation. But whereas fiv Read more ...

It seems like a different world when the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle gave a full concert to an empty hall as the world began to go into lockdown. Now, on continental Europe at least, orchestral musician plus the occasional star conductor and soloist(s) are cautiously reuniting in smaller numbers, though still as yet without a live audience. We look on from the UK, behind as we are in possibilities of release from quarantine, but even here there are a few hopeful signs of players being able to do more than join each other virtually from their own homes. Oslo Philharmonic's Read more ...

The great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau noted of 1920s Berlin that "itimes of trouble, people seek a better life in culture". But what if that culture can no longer be accessed live? Earlier this week theartsdesk brought you reports of two sensational Sunday concerts at each of London's biggest arts centres: a recreation of Beethoven's massive 1808 programme from Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall, and a stunning trio of powerful British masterpieces from violinist Vilde Frang, the London Symphony Orchestra and Antonio Pappano at the Barbican. Then everything Read more ...

Six weeks ago, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation announced that it the winner of its prestigious and extremely valuable main annual prize for 2020 "to a composer, performer, or scholar who has made outstanding contributions to the world of music" will be the viola player Tabea Zimmermann. She commented to an interviewer that what mattered to her most was neither well-paid concert appearances nor playing in large halls, but rather to be involved in things that are interesting for what she called their "Inhalt". The German language is blessed with words that have a whole field of Read more ...

Startlingly high levels of expression and focused fire made this rich concert worthy of the dedicatee who radiated those qualities, Jacqueline du Pré. Beyond even that, this Wigmore Hall special was an oddly synaesthesic experience – or maybe I'm just suggestible; at any rate Joanna MacGregor's full-blooded way with Frank Bridge's torrid late romanticism seemed to drip red, there was ethereal silver in the more other-worldly Shostakovich playing of the Gildas Quartet and gold from their viola player, Jenny Lewisohn, as well as from superlative cellist Adrian Brendel, in perfect synchronicity Read more ...

Three concerts, three fascinating venues, seven world-class young(ish) players, an audience of all ages and a musical storytelling event for 200 schoolchildren: this is how to launch a festival with outwardly modest means. Artistic Director of Classical Vauxhall Fiachra Garvey already has form, as the founder of the West Wicklow Festival (of chamber music), in the part of Ireland where he accommodates his schedule "to help with the yearly lambing, dipping, shearing, harvesting and all the other elegant and refined activities of home" (he was delighted, he told us, to discover Vauxhall's City Read more ...

When I reviewed the Philharmonia’s Weimar season last year I expressed a hope to hear more Hindemith performed in London. When, also last year, I reviewed chamber music at Conway Hall I looked forward to my next visit. So a Conway Hall programme including Hindemith’s Clarinet Quartet was like a magnet. And I wasn’t disappointed by the Hindemith, or by Messiaen’s extraordinary Quartet for the End of Time that made up the second half.Conway Hall is an enterprising venue, as much community centre as concert hall, with a long tradition of Sunday evening chamber music. The attendance was Read more ...

When celebrated individuals get together to play chamber music on special occasions, the result can often turn out as what the late cellist of the Borodin Quartet, Valentin Berlinsky, disparagingly called "festival quality" – meaning a clash, rather than a blend, of personalities. That was never the case for a moment in the opening concert of the eighth Highgate International Chamber Music Festival.Two of its three founders, violinist/composer Natalie Klouda and cellist Ashok Klouda, had invited two of the most experienced soloists in the string world - powerful personality Alexander Read more ...