Steven Osborne (Photo: Ben Ealovega) JW3, the Jewish Community Centre London, is celebrating ten years and its classical season is returning for 2024/25 with six concerts beginning with pianist Steven Osborne in evocations of childhood from Debussy and Schumann plus Schubert's Piano Sonata in A major, D.959. Tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen join forces for Schubert's Schwanengesang, divided into two groups, with the poems by Rellstab and Heine, interleaved with songs by Fauré. Momen returns with Anthony Marwood (violin), Garfield Jackson (viola), Dav ..read more

Igor Levit (Photo: Felix Broede) The Southbank Centre's 2024/25 season [see my preview] starts with a bang featuring a five-day Opening Weekend (25 to 29 September 2024) when Resident Orchestras and Resident Artists join with other guests for a dozen events across the site. Highlights include Joyce DiDonato in Berlioz, a recital from Igor Levit, Rachmaninoff's The Bells and Lawrence Power and Thomas Adès exploring fairy tales. Things kick off with Edward Gardner conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra in Berlioz' La mort de Cléopâtre, plus music by Barber and Beethoven ..read more

Charles Villiers Stanford: Te Deum, Elegiac Ode; Rhian Lois, Samantha Price, Alessandro Fisher, Morgan Pearse, BBC National Orchestra & Chorus of Wales, Adrian Partington; LYRITA Reviewed 23 July 2024 Written 35 years before his pupil Holst's Ode to Death, Stanford's Whitman setting of the same text shows a young composer willing and eager to explore different avenues The list of British composers who set the verse of Walt Whitman is fairly well known, Delius, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Hamilton Harty and Bliss. The poetry's combination of transcendentalism, realism, a religious mysticism u ..read more

Jasdeep Singh Degun performing Arya: concerto for sitar and orchestra with Orchestra of Opera North (Photo Justin Slee) Opera North's Resonance residency programme was launched in 2017 to offer funding, space, time and technical support to professional Global Majority musicians and composers based in the North of England and the Midlands. Now the company is seeking applications from music creators from the Global Majority working in any genre for the next iteration of the programme. In 2024-25, six successful artists will be invited into Opera North’s home in Leeds to develop new ide ..read more

A new festival will be enlivening the City of London in October. The rather awkwardly named City Festival of Music, Invention & Knowledge runs from 10 to 24 October 2024 with a series of evening events from classical and jazz musicians plus free, Before They Are Famous lunchtime recitals. Taking its inspiration from the current Lord Mayor of London, Michael Mainelli's Ligurian heritage, the festival has an Italian theme with a link-up with the Municipality of Genoa (Comune di Genoa) to bring the music of Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) into the City. The festival's opening concert, at the M ..read more

Gundaris Pone: La Serenissima, seven Venetian portraits for orchestra, American Portraits, Avanti!; Liepāja Symphony Orchestra, Guntis Kuzma, Normunds Šnē; SKANI Reviewed 22 July 2024 The first studio recordings of three of Gundaris Pone's large-scale orchestral works reveal a mid-20th century composer of great imagination writing European music yet with his roots in Latvia Latvian-American composer Gundaris Pone wrote music that transcended his country of birth. Born in Riga, his family emigrated to America in 1950, fleeing the advancing Soviet troops, and it was here that Pone tra ..read more

The University of Birmingham's Elgar Concert Hall The University of Birmingham has announced its programme of lunchtime and evening concerts for 2024/24, the Barber Concerts taking place in the Elgar Concert Hall in the university's in the Bramall Music Building, and the Dome studio space. The evening concert series includes the BBC Singers joining forces with Britten Sinfonia, conductor Bob Chilcott, for the premiere of Michael Zev Gordon’s A Kind of Haunting . There are concerts from the brass ensemble, Septura, a recital from soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha and pianist Joseph ..read more

Twogether Duo and Carol Main Live Music Now was the brainchild of Lord Menuhin, and has provided talented musicians at the outset of their careers with professional performance and training opportunities, making live music accessible to all members of society, regardless of their circumstances.  In March 2025, Carol Main MBE FRC will step back from her role as Director of Live Music Now Scotland (LMNS) – a post she has held since the founding of this organisation in 1984. In Carol Main's first year at , working half a day a week, LMNS put on 60 concerts, with a handful of classic ..read more

Yuriy Yurchuk Baritone Yuriy Yurchuk sings the title role in Northern Ireland Opera's new production of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin which opens on 14 September 2024 at the Grand Opera House, Belfast, directed by Cameron Menzies and conducted by Dominic Limburg, with a cast including Mary McCabe, Carolyn Dobbin, Sarah Richmond, Jenny Bourke and Norman Reinhardt. Yuri performed in the company’s productions of La Boheme in 2021 and La Traviata in 2022, whilst his performances of Eugene Onegin have included the New National Theatre in Tokyo earlier this year, the Royal Danish Opera in Cop ..read more

Virginia Woolf: The Waves cover of the first edition, designed by Vanessa Bell Virginia Woolf's 1931 novel, The Waves, is regarded as her most experimental, consisting of ambiguous and cryptic soliloquies spoken mainly by six characters. It is her attempt to evoke the unconscious aspect of being and the innate essence of existence, and so far the work does not seem to have been adapted as an opera, though director Katie Mitchell adapted the work for the stage, at the National Theatre, in 2006 [see Mitchell's article in The Guardian]. Now librettist Tamsin Treverton Jones and comp ..read more