L-R from top: Nicky Spence; Jasdeep Singh Degun; Roman Grigoriv, Olga Diatel and Illia Razumeiko; and Jack Capstaff at the RPS Awards The Royal Philharmonic Society held its awards ceremony at the Royal Northern College of Music on Tuesday night (5 March) – the first time they’ve ever done them out of London. And here are my awards for the highlights of the show: l The ceremony began with Conversation in the Forest by Keiko Abe, performed by “The Sound of Manchester” – Delia Stevens and Le Yu (aka Aurora Percussion Duo), with An ..read more

   Anja Bihlmaier  cr Nikolaj Lund It was Beethoven’s Fourth with zip at the Hallé last night, as Anja Bihlmaier showed her credentials as a conductor of the present day, taking the tempo markings very much at face value and, with the orchestra in fine fettle almost from the first bar, creating a performance of neatness and beauty. She had 40 strings for the entire programme, which also began with Beethoven, in the form of the tone-poem-like Leonora no. 3 overture. I’ve heard it done with more operatic atmosphere – there were only the briefest of pauses, for instance, in this p ..read more

Kahchun Wong (cr. Angie Kremer) Kahchun Wong’s concert with the Hallé was a really interesting one – in the end, not so much for what it had appeared to offer on paper, but for what it gave in practice. The paper interest was a UK premiere: Sofia Gubaidulina’s The Wrath of God, written in 2019, an 18-minute piece for very large orchestra (four Wagner tubas as well as four horns, two bass trombones, two tubas and a lot of percussion). It’s about the day of judgment, and suitably scary. It’s very loud a lot of the time, though there are beautiful and delicately mysterious softer passages too ..read more

  Delyana Lazarova conducts the Hallé  There could have been few orchestral works more appropriate to reflect our thoughts after the death of a sovereign than two we heard played by the Hallé yesterday. Neither was planned with such an event in mind, but Dobrinka Tabakova’s Cello Concerto has a central movement that ends in so still and elegiac an atmosphere as to seem as if written as a meditation on profound loss, and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony is itself a journey into finality and silence. Delyana Lazarova, the assistant conductor to Sir Mark Elder, conducted this opening conc ..read more

Emily Vine (Mabel) and chorus in the National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company's production of The Pirates Of Penzance at Buxton Opera House 2022 The Pirates of Penzance The Gilbert & Sullivan Festival is back at Buxton – hurrah! A full week of performances at the Opera House there precedes two weeks of continued festival in Harrogate, so there’s the best of both worlds for G&S lovers. The shows diary is very much the same as it used to be in the days when Buxton had the festival to itself: a different title almost every day, with the festival’s own National Gilbert & Su ..read more

Jack Roberts (Mr Upfold), Flora Birkbeck (Florence Pike), Erin Rossington (Lady Billows), Jordan Harding (Mr Gedge), Thomas Stevenson (Supt Budd), Lydia Shariff (Mrs Herring) and Daniel Kringer in Clonter Opera's production of Albert Herring Eric Crozier and Benjamin Britten, after Maupassant Clonter Opera Clonter Opera Theatre 14, 16, 17, 19, 21 and 23 July 2022, 2 hours 35 minutes plus supper interval (30 minutes, or 70 minutes in some performances) I love it when an opera company announces Albert Herring. It’s an affectionate send-up of the hypocrisies and absurdities of rural British lif ..read more

                                 Angela Hewitt (cr Fotograf Ole Christiansen) Touring international orchestras are back, thanks to the mighty IMG, and the Bridgewater Hall mustered a small but very enthusiastic audience to welcome Concerto Budapest (formerly the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra) and its chief conductor and artistic director, András Keller, along with Angela Hewitt, the peerless pianist who is always a draw in her own right. The programme offered to Manchester (slightly different from other v ..read more

  Nicholas Ward (left) and Craig Ogden The highspot of the weekend Manchester Guitar Festival at Chetham’s School of Music was a concert on Sunday afternoon by the Northern Chamber Orchestra in the Stoller Hall, featuring Craig Ogden as soloist in both Malcolm Arnold’s Guitar Concerto and Peter Sculthorpe’s Nourlangie. But the concert – a repeat of one given in Macclesfield Heritage Centre the night before – was important for another reason: it was the final performance by the NCO with Nicholas Ward as leader and artistic director. Nick has been in the leader’s chair since 1984, and I’ve ..read more

  Mozart’s late piano concertos are among his greatest and subtlest creations, and consequently both immensely rewarding and, by the same token, very challenging. The ongoing recording project by Manchester Camerata under its music director, Gábor Takács-Nagy, with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet as soloist, brought a fascinating concert at Chetham’s on Friday night. Word had clearly got around: there was hardly a spare seat to be found. Takács-Nagy and the orchestra, led by Caroline Pether, got things off to a fizzing start with the Marriage of Figaro overture – contemporary with the C minor conc ..read more

It's almost Christmas again, and here's a suggestion for something to get for a pianist who wants to venture into the unknown a bit ... Eric Craven: Pieces for Pianists volume 1 (performed by Mary Dullea, Métier msv 28601). Eric Craven is a composer who knows his own mind but doesn’t impose his own will. These 25 short pieces for piano, published in ‘progressive’ order like an old-fashioned collection of classics designed to be an aid to learning, are notated in an unusual way. There are no key signatures (though the score is entirely precise about which notes are to be played and their relati ..read more