L to R: Charlie Coulson (Shepherd Brass Band), Audrey Brown, (Shepherd Brass Band)Cherry Fricker, (Executive Director, National Centre for Early Music) I Can Play with Brass Roots gained the National Award for Band Project of […]
National Youth Orchestra The National Youth Orchestra (NYO) opens 2025 with its Illuminate tour, when Jaime Martin will conduct the teenage musicians in Ravel’s Bolero, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Catamorphosis and Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4 ‘Inextinguishable’, with concerts at […]
Vaughan Williams had a great fondness for Shakespeare and settings of Shakespeare’s texts thread their way through the composer’s life, from the songs The Willow Song (1897), and Orpheus With His Lute (1903), to the larger scale Serenade to […]
Gilbert & Sullivan: Ruddigore – Dominic Sedgwick – Opera North, 2024 (Photo: © Richard H Smith) Gilbert & Sullivan: Ruddigore: Amy Freston, Claire Pascoe, Dominic Sedgwick, Henry Waddington, Xavier Hetherington, Helen Evora, John Savournin, Steven […]
.png?w=510&resize=510,510&ssl=1 "Beyond the idea of just four guys & their trombones: Slide-Action on their mission to create a new voice for the trombone")
Slide Action (Photo: Matt Jolly) Formed in 2018, the trombone quartet Slide Action (Huw Evans, Jamie Tweed, Benny Vernon and Josh Cirtina) has just released its first major album, their debut recital disc. On NMC […]
Britten: A Midsummer Night’s Dream – James Newby, Peter Kirk, Siân Griffiths, Camilla Harris – Opera North, 2024 (Photo: © Richard Hubert Smith) Britten: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; James Laing, Daisy Brown, Daniel Absalom, Camilla […]
Joseph Haydn: Symphony No. 43 in E flat major ‘Mercury’, Symphony No. 44 in E minor, ‘Trauer’, Symphony no. 47 in G major, ‘Palindrome’; Concerto Copenhagen, Lars Ulrik Mortensen; Berlin ClassicsReviewed 22 October 2024 Small […]
Sinfonia Smith Square (Photo: Camila Pastorelli) Every year, Sinfonia Smith Square’s Fellowship programme welcomes 34 talented graduate musicians to form an orchestra. Through world-class collaborations, bold programming, and educational leadership projects, the programme intensifies their […]
Andrew Ford: The Shortest History of MusicOld Street Publishing234 pages, 45 imagesReviewed 21 October 2024 Global musical history digested into just over 200 pages; Ford’s book deftly manages the compression whilst bringing out a wide […]
When the Paris Opera planned to give the first performance at the theatre of Verdi’s Otello the maestro was extremely puzzled when it was announced that they would be performing the opera in Italian. Hitherto the […]
