In taking these momentous scores back to their Parisian roots Klaus Mäkelä, as expected, engages his keen ears and sense of orchestral drama to hear and to project their startling innovation. This Rite is all about inner…

The character of this reading – and it does not, alas, confound expectations – is clearly established at the outset: cellos and basses incisive but hardly seismic, the rhythms crisp, even clipped, the emerging funeral processional more…

Recorded during lockdown, this trio of Shostakovich symphonies chimes quite dramatically with the mood of that time and speaks volumes as to the composer’s shifting state of mind between the war years and the death of his…

I’ve yet to see a staged double-bill of Bartok’s symbolist ballet The Wooden Prince and his allegorical operatic masterpiece Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. A tall and very expensive order however one might approach the challenge. But that, it…

The final instalment in this marvellous cycle of the Carl Nielsen symphonies does not disappoint. The Danish National Symphony Orchestra serve their national hero with self-evident pride and big-heartedness and the Italian at the helm – Fabio…

Two accounts of this great symphony – some would argue (not me) Shostakovich’s greatest – neither about to shake up the top recommendations for the piece but one undoubtedly possessed of the will and temperament to do…