As I contemplate the return of public events and the unimaginable joy of hearing a real orchestra live for the first time in 18 months – that would be at the Proms, I fancy – I am…

Re-hearing Andris Nelsons’ splendid account of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony has left me as ever haunted by the skeletal ‘ticking’ of side drum, castanet and woodblock in the final moments of this the composer’s last symphonic utterance. Of…

Fenella Humphreys wears her virtuosity lightly. She’s one of those very ‘contained’ players whose musicality looks you straight in the eye but never ever draws attention to itself. The inner-tension is palpable tracing out the first subject…

Shostakovich’s first and last symphonies make for intriguing bedfellows: the beginning and end of a tortuous journey, heavy with irony and an all-pervasive sense of doubt and desolation. And yet there is always, one feels, a ‘last…

I really thought I knew this work – every facet of it. But Kirill Petrenko has a way of hearing deep into textures and harmonies that is at times really quite startling. He gives us x-ray ears.…

During the period when I was Chief Classical Music and Opera critic of The Independent newspaper one thing was always sure to spike my blood pressure: interval banter. Of phrases most commonly overheard at the opera the…

Ravel may have lived most of his live in Paris but the Basque National Symphony Orchestra are bound to wear this particular badge with pride. And with that pride, of course, comes an added responsibility that the…

Surely here was an opportunity to stray a little from the well-trodden path and offer perhaps Mussorgsky’s startling original version of Night on the Bare Mountain instead of Rimsky-Korsakov’s popular sanitisation? And given the hugely imaginative title…