Jonathan Dove: Itch - Adam Temple Smith as Itch and Victoria Simmonds as Watkins - Opera Holland Park 2023 (Photo: Craig Fuller) Celebrating the best new classical music and sound art, this year's Ivors Classical Awards take place at BFI Southbank on 12 November 2024 when 11 Ivor Novello Awards will be presented to eight category winners and three Gift of the Academy award winners. BBC Radio 3 will broadcast the ceremony on Saturday 16 November in a special edition of the New Music Show. The Ivors Academy has announced the 36 composers who have been nominated for this year's awards ..read more

En Couleur: Saint-Saens, Ravel, Tailleferre, Debussy, Milhaud;  Trio Colores (Fabian Ziegler, Luca Staffelbach and Matthias Kessper); Solo Musica Reviewed 7 October 2024 Sensitivity of touch and an ear for timbre and colour bring a sense of timbral magical to these reinventions of French music for a group playing marimbas, vibraphones and glockenspiels The art of a good transcription is to reinvent the original in a way which remains true but exploits all the characteristics of the new genre. Sometimes this can be radical and sometimes quite discreet; playing much of Bach's keyboard musi ..read more

Ethel Smyth: The Wreckers - Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe (Photo: Felix Grünschloß) Ethel Smyth's The Wreckers has a fascinatingly international history, the work was written to a French libretto by a France-based American, premiered in German translation in Leipzig. For more background see my 2016 article celebrating The Wreckers at 110, and my 2023 article, A Lady and her Reputation. More recently, the opera has been catching attention, most notably in productions at Glyndebourne in 2022 [see my review, the premiere of the original French version] and Houston Grand Opera. But th ..read more

Kings Place's 17th instalment in its year-long Unwrapped series will be exploring our relationship with nature and the eco-system, plant life and ornithology, the climate crisis, activism, protest and more, through music and spoken word.  Earth Unwrapped, subtitled Sirens for a wounded planet, begins in January 2025 and continues throughout that year. The series will feature artists in residence, Mercury Prize nominated singer-songwriter Sam Lee, composer and producer Gazelle Twin (aka UK composer, producer, singer and visual artist Elizabeth Bernholz) and sound arti ..read more

"in music many people are never exposed to long-form compositions, or more challenging works; and I think they should be" nonclassical founder, Gabriel Prokofiev nonclassical in action (Photo: Nick Rutter) Music promoter, record label and events producer - nonclassical embraces a variety of roles and for twenty years has also embraced other genres and unconventional spaces, cultivating a young and dedicated following. Now celebrating its 20th birthday, nonclassical began in 2004 as a merging of contemporary classical music with electronic music and culture with its first concert of t ..read more

Queen Elizabeth I awaiting the performance of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire in the Marble Hall at Hatfield House Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Schubert: String Quintet in C; Claire Booth, Ensemble 360, Magnus Johnston, Max Baillie, Brett Dean, Guy Johnston; Hatfield House Music Festival Reviewed 13 October 2024 A vividly Expressionist account of Schoenberg's influential masterpiece contrasting with Schubert's late chamber work in a performance full of vibrant energy Two contrasting masterpieces, written under a century apart, each having a completely different effect on its first perfor ..read more

Page from the edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses published by Lucantonio Giunti in Venice, 1497 Marc-Antoine Charpentier: Actéon, Jean-Philippe Rameau:Pygmalion; Anna Dennis, Rachel Redmond, Katie Bray, Thomas Walker , Academy of Ancient Music, Laurence Cummings; Barbican Reviewed by Tony Cooper, 9 October 2024 Rarities on the British stage such dramas of human emotion and divine power contained in Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Actéon and Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Pygmalion were penned by two of the most imaginative and well-respected composers of the French baroque era.  The Academy ..read more

Title page of the "Bassus Generalis" for one of the partbooks in which the Vespers were published in 1610 Monteverdi: Vespers of 1610; Solomon's Knot; Wigmore Hall Reviewed 12 October 2024 A chance to hear Monteverdi's vespers in an acoustic bringing out the more intimate qualities, with the highly communicative singers enjoying the more madrigalian elements of the music After hearing The Sixteen in Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 in the acoustic splendour of Temple Church [see my review] earlier in the week, on Saturday it was the turn of a rather different approach. Solomon's Knot, art ..read more

Trio Bohémo Formed in 2019 by three Czech musicians, Matouš Pěruška (violin), Kristina Vocetková (cello) and Jan Vojtek (piano), Trio Bohémo released their debut disc on Supraphon in August 2024, featuring Schubert’s great E flat Piano Trio D929 and Smetana’s Trio in G minor Op 15. The disc has already garnered praise, and the trio has a tour of the UK during October and November 2024 [see their website for details].  I recently spoke to the three of them, via Zoom, to chat about the new disc, their attitude to programming and performing, and their fondness for England. The ..read more

Alma Mahler remains a fascinating figure. Musically active as a composer, albeit for a relatively short time, her life has been rather overshadowed by her relationships. She married the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius, and the author Franz Werfel, whilst her affairs included the painter Gustav Klimt, the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky and the painter Oskar Kokoschka. The death of daughter Manon Gropius partly inspired Alban Berg's Violin Concerto.  Since her death in 1964, her life has inspired a wide variety of art and music. Britten dedicated his Noctur ..read more