Barcelona Obertura Spring Festival
In the L’Auditori’s chamber hall there was an intense and deeply rewarding performance of the string trio version (by Sitkovetsky) of Bach Goldberg Variations…
Klara Festival, Brussels
Below another hill, a mile away in Ixelles is Flagey, a wonderful art deco building by a lake that was the home for the National Radio Institute, hosting the broadcasters in both French and Flemish, until the 1990s…
Herbst (Autumn) Gold Festival
When Julian Rachlin, as Artistic Director, planned the concerts for Sunday 17 September he can hardly have anticipated how they would resonate with the day’s political context…
The BBC Proms 2022: August 2&3
On consecutive nights the Prommers saw two relatively young conductors who might seem to have little in common, the very English Nicholas Collon and the very Californian Ryan Bancroft. But they have both recently been appointed to direct Scandinavian orchestras of great prestige: Collon the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (the first ever non-Finn to do so) and Bancroft the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic…
Perelada Festival
Whoever paid the swan to fly across the stage just as dusk turned to night with the Pyrenees as the backdrop was inspired! The swan glided, the musicians began to play and Sergei Bernal, dressed only in gold pantaloons, started to impersonate Rodin’s sculpture Torse d’homme Louis XIV…
The BBC Proms 2022: July 19
What better way to test the Royal Albert Hall’s new air cooling system than to subject it to a late Prom on the hottest London night ever. Hooray, it passed!…