When the fiery chariot finally arrived to transport Elijah aloft and the antiphonal trumpets and drums and assorted ophicleides of Paul McCreesh’s mightily augmented Gabrieli Players Consort and Players were rent asunder by the open-stopped thrust of…
Sir Colin Davis’ vim and vigour has always seemed so eternal, so unaffected by the advancing years, that it was strange, not to say difficult, to discover him conducting now from a chair. You could see and…
Two Prokofiev symphonies for the price of one – the First and Fifth, the little and large of the canon – and surprisingly it was the bantam weight First that yielded Valery Gergiev’s biggest surprises and tiniest…
There are programmes and there are Proms programmes and this three-tier special was of mythic proportions. It started as it meant to go on, with a big bang, as Andrew Litton and the Royal Philharmonic brasses and…
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the shower… the sound of those slicing, dicing, violin glissandi – halfway between screams and flashes of cold steel – sent ripples of recognition and nervous…
The building had barely cooled down after the Simon Bolivar Mahler the previous night but youth still ruled at the Proms with the arrival of our own National Youth Orchestra and that eternal wild child Nigel Kennedy…
The Royal Albert Hall can be an intimate place, mysteriously transforming on occasions from monster auditorium to private salon. There’s something about a small group of players, or in this case singers – the BBC Singers –…
At 33, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Music Dirctor Andris Nelsons is young but still almost a decade older than Richard Strauss was when he showed the world how he planned to go on with his…
The aria – “Ebben? Ne andrò lontano” – famously adorning the films Diva and A Single Man is almost as ubiquitous as the eponymous heroine’s name – which features in the Guinness Book of Records as being…
Homecomings, real and imagined, marked out this season’s Hallé Prom. For Sibelius, brazen horn fanfares and myriad string ostinati carried us at the gallop to the heart of the Finnish heartlands. Everything in his rarely performed Scènes…