This program exploring different stages of life opened with Julia Wolfe’s Fountain of Youth, 2019, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the New World Symphony. The title pays homage to the young musicians of the NWS, […]
Among 20th century English composers, Rutland Boughton was once much more widely known than he is today, principally for two achievements – founding the first music festival at Glastonbury in 1914, intended to act as […]
The first half of this intriguing and memorable concert was taken up by Luca Francesconi’s Duende: The Dark Notes. Leila Josefowicz collaborated with the composer during the writing of the piece, which she premiered in […]
Jonathan Miller’s production of Rigoletto for English National Opera is now over 40 years old – and this is its 14th revival – but it’s still a classic. Miller’s note in the programme from the […]
Such is the dramatic vitality of Verdi’s Rigoletto that there is already a sense that it presents a metatheatre of a corrupt, cruel world, embodied in microcosm in the Duke of Mantua’s court. In her […]
Five months since including Sofia Gubaidulina’s 1996 Concerto for Viola and Orchestra, the Philharmonic gave its first-ever performance of her Fairytale Poem. Composed for a 1971 children’s radio program, the alluring piece is based on […]
Returning to the UK for the first time in 27 years, the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra began its three-venue tour with blistering performances of two Western classics and music by the largely self-taught Akira Ifukube […]
Music and Artistic Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the Philadelphia Orchestra in this exciting performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony, the work that epitomizes the composer’s music perhaps more than any other. He brought out in distinctive […]
The evening opened with Matthias Pintscher leading the US premiere of his tone poem neharot, which he describes as ‘a tombeau, a requiem, a kaddish – for all the people we have lost’ in the […]
I once tried to introduce a friend to Bruckner via the Fifth Symphony. The concert did not go down well – ‘the work of a madman’ was just one of the reservations I recall. And […]
