Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2025 i BBC Music Magazine

Next year marks the 20th anniversary of Hildur Guðnadóttir’s debut solo album, Mount A, a milestone the experimental Icelandic cellist and composer will celebrate with live performances featuring friends and colleagues. This spirit of collaborative music-making rather belies the perception of Guðnadóttir as a private creative talent inspired during solitary walking, biking and driving expeditions – and drawn to all things dark and melancholy. Yet the composer has always been something of a contradiction, captivated equally by classical music, and by rock and electronics. The two come together especially well in Guðnadóttir’s soundtracks for film and television, among them Tár, The Joker and Chernobyl. Still relatively rare as a female composer in this field – and even more so as an Oscar and Golden Globe winner – Guðnadóttir takes her…

The National Arts Centre (NAC) in Ottawa, Canada, has announced that conductor John Storgårds is to be its next music director. The Finn succeeds Alexander Shelley, who will be leaving in the summer of 2026. Storgårds, who is also chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic and the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra in Finland, knows the NAC Orchestra well, having served as its principal guest conductor since 2015. Nor will the dark, chilly Ottawa winters daunt him – he is also the long-serving artistic director of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra.…

My mum was active as a pianist when I was a child living in Sarajevo, and I’d spend many hours listening to her practise. She would play a lot of Ravel, Debussy préludes and Prokofiev sonatas, and because these early-20th-century composers are what I was exposed to, they are in my blood. She also introduced to me the reality of being a musician. I would go to her concerts – for a four year-old, it’s quite something to see your mum on stage – and we would also go to the opera and ballet a lot, which made a massive impression on me. The spectacle and sheer size of it all was one thing, but then we would also get to go backstage where we would meet the performers and…

Pick a theme… and name your seven favourite examples Sir Donald Runnicles studied at the University of Edinburgh and St John’s College, Cambridge, before beginning his career as a singers’ coach and assistant conductor in Mannheim, Germany. He has been music director and principal conductor of the San Francisco Opera, music director of the Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming, US, and chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. This autumn, he begins his tenure as chief conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic, launching the season with a British Festival highlighting leading artists and compositions from the UK. Gustav Holst The Planets The Planets is rightly one of the pillars of British music and one of the most popular pieces for both audiences and orchestras. It’s so well orchestrated and…

Along with the rush of cascading waterfalls and erupting geysers, Iceland’s most identifiable soundscape is choral. The heroic songs of early modern Europe found life as Edda, an Icelandic version of the German Nibelungenlied beloved by Wagner. The later rímur – a spoken-sung epic poem – saw musicians travelling across the country as Rímur Tellers, a tradition that has been recently revived. It wasn’t until 1950 that Iceland had its own official state symphony orchestra, which was based for many years in Reykjavík’s largest cinema. In the following decade, pianist Thórunn Jóhannsdóttir met Vladimir Ashkenazy while she was studying at the Moscow Conservatory. To marry Ashkenazy, Jóhannsdóttir had to give up her Icelandic citizenship, but after several years in the USSR the couple returned to Iceland, with Ashkenazy becoming naturalised.…

Listening or playing music to alleviate misery is one thing. For composers, sitting down and writing it can also provide a similar cure, and history tells of many instances of them doing just that. In September 1936, the life of English composer Herbert Howells (pictured above) took an appalling turn for the worse when, just three days after complaining of feeling unwell, his son Michael died of polio, aged just nine. Howells initially responded to the situation with a period of inactivity – ‘too frozen to write’, in his own words. However, it was his daughter Ursula who eventually persuaded him that he might want to remember his beloved ‘Mick’ by composing something in tribute to him. Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi was the eventual result. Taking his own Requiem of 1932…

‘When I had my first kid,’ posted Lidiya Yankovskaya on social media in 2022, ‘people told me that no one wanted to see a pregnant conductor, that I couldn’t possibly conduct while caring for a newborn, and that being a mother and being a conductor are incompatible.’ This was, in fact, something that the Russian-American conductor had proved entirely untrue the previous year when, as the music director of the Chicago Opera Theatre, she took to the podium to conduct the company’s final performance of Becoming Santa Claus… just three days after giving birth to her second child. A pregnant Yankovskaya had begun conducting the Mark Adamo opera in Chicago eight days earlier – on 11 December – and left audiences stunned when she returned to the stage to close…

‘What Americans call safe music bores me,’ declared Michel Legrand in a 2005 interview, in which he reflected on the high profile he had achieved as one of the world’s leading film composers. ‘If you’re expecting music that has no surprises,’ he continued, ‘then it’s no use calling me.’ It was a fitting summary of a remarkable compositional career in which Legrand’s stylistic versatility embraced not only an unusually wide variety of filmscoring styles, but also jazz, pop songs, musical theatre and concert works. As well as his seemingly effortless skills as a tunesmith, he was just as capable of writing sophisticated orchestral music, and in doing so exploited the technical dexterity he had learned as a student at the Paris Conservatoire. He attended this prestigious institution from eleven to…

The work Had Tchaikovsky had his way, his The Tempest might not actually have had a tempest in it at all. As he first pondered his Shakespearean fantasy-overture in early 1873, the Russian composer considered that by placing the romance between Miranda and Ferdinand at the very heart of his work, he might be able to dispense entirely with the storm that gave the original play its name. And if this was the case, he ventured in a letter to Vladimir Stasov, the influential scholar and critic who had suggested the piece, he also had another idea: ‘Could I perhaps call the overture Miranda?’. Tchaikovsky was a major Shakespeare fan, taking the plays with him when travelling ‘Of course there must be a tempest. Without it the overture wouldn’t be…

Welcome This is my first issue as Reviews Editor, and what better way to begin? Isabelle Faust takes centre stage in our Recording of the Month with a stunning collection of Bach’s lesser-known violin works. Elsewhere, the inimitable Abel Selaocoe’s debut cello concerto and most exploratory release yet, Four Spirits, is a magnificent work weaving the artist’s biography and reflections on township life and community together through varying cello techniques, improvisation and lyrics in Southern Sotho and Zulu languages. Other standouts include The Idiot, Weinberg’s epic opera based on Dostoyevsky’s novel, a magical ode to Arvo Pärt from Vox Clamantis and, for those who love their musicals, the first ever studio recording of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady in its entirety! Miranda Bardsley Reviews editor This month’s critics John…

Beethoven Symphony No. 9 Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine; Chœur de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux; Chœur d’Angers Nantes Opéra/Joseph Swensen Alpha Classics ALPHA1163 70:43 mins Hans Keller once compared the opening of Beethoven’s last symphony from Toscanini – who sculpted the sextuplets in cellos and violas with metronomic exactitude – and Furtwängler – who made it sound imprecise, primordial, yet inescapably gripping – as ‘the beginning before the beginning’. Throughout this new recording, Joseph Swensen emulates Toscanini’s textual clarity, but the principal drawback with this traversal is its unyielding rhythmic grip. There’s none of Furtwängler’s portentous, cosmos-shifting ambiguity here; instead, Swensen obtains urgently responsive playing throughout the vast opening movement, whilst offering little contemplative reprieve. Beethoven’s intentionally neurotic scherzo, too, seems harddriven, its restless tenacity all too palpable in the trio…

Kalevi Aho Magnus Lindberg Clarinet Concertos Julian Bliss (clarinet); BBC Scottish SO/Taavi Oramo Signum Classics SIGCD898 60:58 mins Magnus Lindberg’s concertos are unconventionally conventional: whether it’s in his music for piano, trombone, or, as here, clarinet, the Finnish composer pushes the soloist into a virtuosic stratosphere. The 2002 Clarinet Concerto is now well established as a dazzling diamond in the repertoire rough, although few have recorded it since dedicatee Kari Kriikku won BBC Music Magazine’s Premiere Award in 2006. It’s exciting, then, to hear it taken up by Julian Bliss, a clarinettist who thrives in this scampering sound world. Lindberg’s language balances memorable melodic material with Gershwinian glissandi and piquant upper-octave phrases. The cadenza is Bliss’s own; from its restrained opening to repeated ascents it is an extraordinary and engaging…

Bosmans Songs*; Six Préludes pour piano; Sonate pour violon et piano *Elizaveta Agrafenina (soprano), Sarah Bayens (violin), Dimitri Malignan (piano) Edition Hortus Hortus 834 61:69 mins Henriëtte Bosmans is to my ears one of the ‘keepers’ from the resurgence of interest in neglected female composers. Until recently, the Dutch composer’s music had all but vanished from view, but in her day, she enjoyed a successful career, was friendly with Britten and Pears, and was fortunate to survive World War II, being half Jewish. This recording is part of an excellent series reviving music by composers persecuted by the Nazis. Bosmans’s charismatic works for cello and piano have notched up some excellent recordings and this collection of songs, piano and chamber music contains works that are equally interesting. Her style has…

CPE Bach Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord Ryo Terakado (violin); Fabio Bonizzoni (harpsichord) Challenge Classics CC72971 72.29 mins Long overshadowed in the modern imagination by his father Johann Sebastian, CPE Bach’s own genius shines through in this superlative album from two masterful performers. It opens with an enthralling, heart-aching account of the Fantasia in F sharp minor, written in 1788, the year CPE Bach died, with its first movement marked ‘very sad and utterly slow’. Elsewhere, we find CPE in all his sparky, energetic and expressive glory in three sonatas from 1763. Rebecca Franks Dvořák String Quartet, ‘American’ Op.96, String Quintet, Op.97 & Humoresques, Op.101 Mandelring Quartett; Roland Glassl Audite AUDITE97828 77.08mins The Mandelring Quartet – three Schmidt siblings plus long-time friend and violist Andreas Willwohl – are full of vim…

Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez Piano Works Clélia Iruzun (piano) Naxos 8.574593 1:12:39 A contemporary and compatriot of Villa-Lobos, Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez (1897-1948) is best known today for his orchestral suite Reisado do Pastoreio. Elegantly played here by Clélia Iruzun, his piano works are short – generally around three minutes-orso – melodious and largely very charming. Among them, the highlights are the three Suites Brasileiras in which, as the name implies, the composer proudly wears his national colours, plus the feisty, technically challenging Sonata Breve. Jeremy Pound Satie Works arr. Solo guitar, solo guitar and flute*, solo guitar and soprano** Xuefei Yang (guitar), Sharon Bezaly (flute)*, Héloïse Werner (soprano)** Platoon PLAT26708 44:25 mins This beautiful album reimagines Satie’s Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, art songs and cabaret melodies for solo guitar – plus flute…

Everything We Do Is Music – How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop Elizabeth Alker Faber 304pp (hb) £20 The concept behind Elizabeth’s Alker’s book is spelled out in the subtitle: ‘How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop.’ This enormous, potentially unwieldy topic is, however, slimmed down by concentrating on mainly electronic music – and the concepts and technology behind its evolution. Alker is clearly a fan of these explorations and approaches the topic with a mix of anecdotes, conversations with contemporary composers and excellent historical detail. She starts early in the century and discusses the great thinkers and experimenters, their thirst for progression and their often highly geeky lifestyles. Gleefully borrowing many of the concepts, pop musicians have embraced technology and thinking around the creation of new sonic worlds; some, however,…

The Art of Andreas Scholl (HMX2904131.36) offers a welcome chance to dive into the back catalogue of one of today’s leading countertenors. It was 30 years ago that Scholl first recorded for Harmonia Mundi, releasing an album of German Baroque songs that forms the first of six CDs included in this new set. An album of German Baroque cantatas nods to his home country, but Scholl also turns his attention to English repertoire, and the master of melancholy, John Dowland. Two albums dedicated to Handel, exploring famous arias and scenes, make this a wonderful celebration of Scholl’s artistry. Mikhail Pletnev might be, as the liner note describes him, a ‘mad genius, free electron of rigour, serious prankster, facetious tragedian, concentrated eccentric’. But the Russian pianist’s musical credentials are far less elusive,…

Having joined the BBC in 1986, Eleanor Oldroyd has become well known as the presenter of radio programmes including Radio 1’s Newsbeat and 5 Live Sport, and is perhaps most familiar to many as the voice of 5 Live’s cricket coverage. She commentated for BBC Radio on the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh and the Coronation of Charles III and Camilla, and has also presented programmes on choral music for Radio 3. Her book Composers of Barnes: The Flow of Inspiration was published in 2016. Music was always on at home. Both my parents sang – my mum was an alto and my dad was a tenor – and my dad was a vicar at the parish church in Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire where, along with my two brothers,…

Claire Jackson Music journalist ‘Iceland has given us Björk, the world’s first female president… and Hildur Guðnadóttir, the first woman composer to simultaneously win an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe. We talked cellos and coulrophobia.’ Page 24 Michael White Journalist and author ‘Over lunch in a grand London club, I learned about a violin with an interesting “story” that I would have to travel to a distant European village to pursue. So, feeling like something out of Jules Verne, off I duly went…’ Page 50 Anne Templer Writer and percussionist ‘Exploring the obstacles of combining childbirth with a musical career has often been seen as a great unspoken embarrassment. It was a privilege to talk to my colleagues about the hurdles they have overcome.’ Page 58…

There’s a mischievous joke running through Harold Evans’s scathing account of the British newspaper industry in the 1970s and ’80s, Good Times, Bad Times. As editor of The Times, he constantly tries to make contact with the paper’s arts editor. Each time he attempts to set up a meeting he’s told that this elusive figure is ‘reviewing music festivals’ and in transit somewhere between Bayreuth and Verbier, or maybe Salzburg and Aixen-Provence. In the end, Evans himself leaves the paper, still never having met his arts editor. Ah, those were the days! Today’s newspaper critics would count themselves lucky to be allowed to review even one foreign music festival a year. Over the decades, however, I have managed to get to a few of them. And what never ceases to…

Jón Leifs (1899-1968) Leifs’s early impetus as a composer came from Icelandic folksong. The country’s landscape would then inspire dramatic choral and orchestral works such as Hekla and Dettifoss, depicting a volcano and waterfall respectively, though it was the tragic death of his daughter that gave rise to his best known work, 1947’s Requiem. Hafliði Hallgrímsson (born 1941) A former principal cellist of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Hallgrímsson’s former teachers include Peter Maxwell Davies. Much of his work is for chambersized ensembles, including Poemi, his 1983 concerto for violin and strings. Björk (Guðmundsdóttir) (born 1965) Citing Stockhausen and Philip Glass among her key influences, Björk is Iceland’s most successful ever songwriter, with sales of over 40 million records, and an important electronic music pioneer. Her 2017 book 34 Scores for…

Founded in 1998 by Chinese conductor Long Yu, the Beijing Music Festival has become the most prestigious classical music festival in the region. Following last year’s Gershwin premiere, the festival returns from 10-24 October with the first performances in China of Berg’s Wozzeck – Charles Dutoit will conduct the Shanghai Symphony and Opera Ballet Vlaanderen in a production that celebrates the opera’s 100th anniversary. The English Concert will also perform Handel’s Rinaldo with a British cast and Chinese countertenor Liu Shen at the Forbidden City Concert Hall. This season also includes world premieres by three Chinese composers: Huang Ruo, Elliot Leung and Pulitzer Prize winner Du Yun, whose work features ethnic Jino musicians. Huang’s piece is performed by the BBC Philharmonic with conductor John Storgårds, alongside Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony. The…

It’s one thing for an actor to learn enough to look like they know what they’re doing, but some actors really do know. Jeff Goldblum has played the piano since he was a kid and transferred those skills to some of his iconic screen characters, including Seth Brundle in David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986). Also no stranger to the keyboard is Jamie Foxx, who studied piano in San Diego and at Juilliard. He famously played pianist Ray Charles in the 2005 film Ray and won an Oscar for his efforts. Just a few years later he learned to play the cello when he took on the role of real-life street virtuoso Nathaniel Ayers in the 2009 drama The Soloist. Dermot Mulroney is a classically trained cellist who has performed on…

Alpesh Chauhan (conductor) BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Chandos CHSA5300 Tchaikovsky later became disenchanted with The Tempest, describing it as ‘too long, episodic and unbalanced’. Nonetheless, even given this verdict he might have been a little disappointed by how few of the most famous conductors have recorded it over the years, especially in comparison to the vast stacks of high-profile recordings enjoyed by, say, his ultra-popular 1812 Overture, a work he said was composed ‘without warmth and without love’. There are one or two big names in there, of course. These include Arturo Toscanini, whose 1944 account with the NBC Symphony Orchestra comes with both fluffy recorded sound and fluffed horns; and, several decades later, came not one but two versions from Toscanini’s fellow Italian Claudio Abbado (see above). Tchaikovsky has…

Elsa Barraine Symphonies Nos 1 & 2 etc WDR Sinfonieorchester/Elena Schwarz CPO 555704-2 60.78 mins This is an indispensable guide to Elsa Barraine, a 20th-century French composer whose music was performed at the BBC Proms for the first time this summer. Moral conviction fuel her (anti-war) neoclassical Symphony No. 2 of 1938 and anti-fascist symphonic poem Pogromes. The programme, played with conviction by the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln under Elena Schwarz, also includes the ambitious First Symphony. Rebecca Franks Tania León Horizons; Raíces (Origins); Stride; Pasajes LPO/Edward Gardner/Karina Canellakis et al LPO LPO0135 55.46 mins Celebrating Tania León’s two-year composerin-residence partnership with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, this live album features four large-scale orchestral commissions, variously inspired by León’s multicultural heritage. Splashes of orchestral colour, with an emphasis on winds and…

Weinberg The Idiot Bogdan Volkov, Aušrine Stundytė et al; Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor, Wiener Philharmoniker/Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla et al Unitel 811408/811504 (DVD/Blu-ray) 196 mins There’s a good deal of evidence to suggest that Mieczysław Weinberg’s seventh and final opera The Idiot, an ambitious stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s famous novel of the same name, is a profoundly moving testimony to the Polishborn Jewish composer’s life in the Soviet Union. The parallels are drawn through Weinberg’s identification with the opera’s central figure of Prince Myshkin, whose sheer kindness and lack of guile leads the other characters in the opera to abuse his good nature and assume mistakenly that he lacks any intelligence. Weinberg composed this huge work between 1986 and 1989, but with little expectation that it would ever reach the stage. In fact,…

Campra Requiem; Miserere Les Arts Florissants/William Christie Pentatone PTC 5187 479 81:20 mins Part of the aspiring generation of composers who came into their own after the death of Lully, André Campra is only now beginning to get a better hearing on the concert platform and in the recording studio. This disc from Les Arts Florissants and their founder and director William Christie gives an insight into some of his religious music. The Requiem is an early work and dates from Campra’s time as master of music at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris. It was likely written in 1695 for the funeral of the archbishop of Paris, François de Harlay de Champvallon, and is lavishly scored for strings, woodwind and organ. The choir (divided into large and small sections) is joined…

November round-up Like Giacomo Smith (left), the young Italian soprano saxophonist Betty Accorsi came to London as a conservatoire trained classical player; she transitioned to jazz via further study at Trinity Laban. Nature Prints is Accorsi’s third album in five years, in which her reputation as a distinctive composer and soloist has grown. Citing Wayne Shorter as her muse for the new material, Accorsi’s delightful songs describe her discoveries of art in nature. Melodic, painterly sax lines are complemented touchingly by her natural, heartfelt singing on numbers like ‘Mary’ and ‘Garden Trip’. Pianist Dan Hewson with Andy Hamill (bass) and Joe Edwards (drums) provide the well sprung transport for Accorsi’s poetry in motion. (Betty Accorsi Music BAMCD0003) Winning the inaugural Brubeck Living Legacy Prize helped (London-based) Dutch alto saxophonist Kasper…

November round-up Two centuries after Lully’s Proserpine (left), Richard Wagner rebuilt the Baroque opera house at Bayreuth, where his son Siegfried became assistant conductor in 1894, a decade after his father’s death. Taught by his grandfather Liszt, Wagner disciple Engelbert Humperdinck, and conductors Felix Mottl and Hans Richter, Siegfried’s debut Ring cycle in 1896 was the first at Bayreuth in 20 years – and 30 years later, with the arrival of electrical recording, he set down these excerpts from his father’s operas and an overture of his own. Newly remastered, they’re startlingly clear, exposing the frailties of the playing, yet also Siegfried’s deep understanding of the music, including the famous Siegfried Idyll that was his birthright. (SOMM ARIADNE5043) For some pianophiles Alfred Cortot is the 20th century’s greatest French pianist,…

Write to: The editor, BBC Music Magazine, Eagle House, Bristol, BS1 4ST Email: music@classical-music.com Social media: contact us on Facebook and X (Twitter) A legend remembered Ashutosh Khandekar’s warmhearted article marking Pavarotti’s 90th birthday (October) brought back special memories. In the early 1960s, we were gathered around the television, looking forward to hearing Giuseppe di Stefano top the bill on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, only for Bruce Forsyth to announce he had been taken ill and would be replaced by a young Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti. This shy, very thin young man enchanted us with Puccini. In 1964, our school music O-Level group went to a rehearsal at Glyndebourne of Mozart’s Idomeneo, and there was the still-slim Pavarotti singing Idamante. Many years later, I interviewed him prior to…

THIS MONTH Kitty Whately mezzo-soprano CONCERT HEAVEN Careful the tale you tell Kitty Whately (mezzo-soprano), Simon Lepper (piano) et al Wigmore Hall (December 2020) My ‘Concert Heaven’ choice is a recital called ‘Careful the tale you tell’ with my parents, Kevin Whately and Madelaine Newton, who are actors, and the pianist Simon Lepper. It was about fairy tales, and my parents were reading poetry that complemented the songs. Obviously, we hadn’t been performing much in the months running up to this, in 2020, when so many gigs were cancelled. Being on stage with my parents and being able to make music after such a long time made this concert really special. It was also very strange as there was no audience in the Wigmore Hall. John Gilhooly, who runs the…

Seong-Jin Cho (above) won third prize in the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow when he was only 17 and subsequently headed abroad for further studies. ‘For me the most important thing was to experience European culture, so I decided to move to Paris,’ he says. He was inspired by leafing through a brochure for the Salle Pleyel: ‘All my favourite pianists – Radu Lupu, Martha Argerich, Krystian Zimerman, Grigory Sokolov – were coming to Paris every year. ‘I met Michel Béroff at the Tchaikovsky Competition, where he was a jury member. I have always admired him; his Prokofiev concerto recording with the Gewandhaus Orchestra and Kurt Masur is one of the greatest. With my Korean teacher I had learned Classical and Romantic repertoire, but I’m interested in 20th-century music like…

Freden isn’t exactly a destination, but it sits in the middle of rolling countryside dotted with picture-book villages that are. For anyone interested in the Freden Music Festival (fredenermusiktage. de), it’s an 80-minute drive from Hanover. There’s only one hotel, the Steinhof, and you’ll have stayed in better. But the staff are friendly. And when you need escape, there are nearby places like Einbeck: an ancient town whose streets are lined with 16th-century brewers’ houses leading to a classic German market square with cafes. Slightly further away is Hildesheim, whose majestic churches were all but flattened by wartime bombs but have been handsomely rebuilt in an austere but stylish way that honours their original architecture. What’s more, many of their treasures were saved by removal before hostilities began. So, the…

Among the many remarkable aspects of Clara Schumann’s life was the fact that she gave birth to eight children – seven of whom lived to adulthood. Given she lived in the 19th century, it is astonishing that she continued her career as an international concert pianist throughout her pregnancies – and indeed was still pregnant with her last child when husband Robert was committed to an asylum. While not quite at Clara’s level, many musicians today must navigate significant obstacles associated with pregnancy and childbirth, yet curiously the topic is often avoided. This may come from a place of good intention – to avoid appearing sexist, fellow professionals prefer to concentrate on safer, work-related topics. But to ignore this profound event seems neglectful and unnecessary. Becoming a mother is, after…

Neoclassicism Lyricist Alan Bergman described ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ as ‘a long Baroque melody’, and much of Legrand’s music was influenced by JS Bach. His theme for Vivre sa Vie recalls the St Matthew Passion, while his score for The Go-Between (below) was, Legrand said, ‘like the Brandenburg Concertos’. Modernism The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) may contain Legrand’s most famous pop song, but the soundtrack also includes some striking modernisms. At one tense moment, Legrand gradually stacks up a fully 12-note chord, introducing every chromatic note with an intervallic logic of which any pupil of Schoenberg’s would have been proud. Songwriting The melody of ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’, as often with Legrand, is built up from sequential repetitions of the same phrase. Also characteristic is its circular nature.…

Though he at no point led an entirely carefree life, the summer of 1873, during which he wrote The Tempest, saw the 33-year-old Tchaikovsky in a comparatively good place. Graduation in 1865 had been followed by being appointed professor of music at the new Moscow Conservatory, which he combined with employment as a (surprisingly waspish) music critic. His First and Second Symphonies had both enjoyed their premieres and the composer Balakirev was proving a strong supporter. Ballets, operas and four further symphonies – plus an increasingly tumultuous personal life – all lay in the future.…

Gluck Orphée et Eurydice (Paris Version) Reinoud Van Mechelen, Ana Vieira Leite et al; Les Arts Florissants et al Harmonia Mundi HAF 8905401.02 128:21 mins (2CD) After listening to this recording of Gluck’s 1774 Paris reworking of his Orpheus and Eurydicethemed opera, you might not – unlike Orpheus as he leaves the underworld – want to look back at the original 1762 Vienna version. As the conductor Paul Agnew points out, Orphée et Eurydice was a new work, crafted to meet the tastes, traditions and opportunities that Gluck encountered during his time in the French capital. The Italian libretto was translated and adapted into the French dramatic style, the lead castrato part was changed to a haute-contre high tenor and the opera was lengthened by the inclusion of ballet sequences.…

Beethoven Violin Sonatas Nos 2 & 10 Viktoria Mullova (violin), Alasdair Beatson (piano) Signum Classics SIGCD920 42:29 mins My bet is that the first thing you’ll notice about this recording is the sound of the instruments: we’re no longer in the sleek world of Steinways and gleaming steel-string violins. Instead, ready yourself for rustic texture and bags of character, thanks to gut strings and a classical bow for violinist Viktoria Mullova, copies of two different 19th-century fortepianos for Alasdair Beatson, and a recording from Signum that doesn’t smooth over the sound. Once your ear has acclimatised, it might well be the energy and sheer brio that Mullova and Beatson bring to Beethoven’s violin sonatas that hooks you in. Take the Allegro vivace of the Sonata No. 2 in A major,…

JS Bach Cello Suites (arr. trumpet) Jonathan Freeman-Attwood (trumpet) Deux-Elles DXL-1207 98:02 mins (2CD) JS Bach’s six Suites for solo cello, BWV 1007-1012, were relatively unknown until they were recorded in full by the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals. Casals’s recordings for HMV between 1936 and 1939 helped establish the Suites’ canonical status, and they are now synonymous with artistic and technical virtuosity, aspects which Jonathan Freeman-Attwood’s double album embodies. Freeman-Attwood will be known to readers as a record producer, broadcaster, conservatoire leader and trumpet soloist. The latter comes to the fore in this recording of his own transcription of the Suites. The recording coincides with Edition Peters’s publication of Freeman-Attwood’s transcription. Bach’s music is transposed into more idiomatic keys for the trumpet, and Freeman-Attwood maintains each suite’s integrity amidst reworking…

Giacomo Smith Manouche Giacomo Smith (clarinet), Mozes Rosenberg (guitar) Stunt Records STUCD25042 Giacomo Smith has been a driving force on the UK’s live jazz scene since he arrived in London just over a decade ago from New York, ostensibly for an office job but packing his clarinet and alto sax. In 2013 he co-founded the house band for Kansas Smitty’s, a jumping jazz joint in Hackney. Since then, his take on golden age jazz through ventures like the Armstrong-inspired Hot Five and The 1925 sextet has connected a younger generation with the tradition. For Manouche, Smith’s circled back to a boyhood influence – Hubert Rostaing, Django Reinhardt’s ’40s clarinettist. With guitarist Mozes Rosenberg in the hot seat beside him, and its ‘manouche pump’ rhythm section, the quartet’s music is drenched…

Lully Proserpine Soloists; Le Concert Spirituel/Hervé Niquet Glossa GCD921635 149:20 mins (2CD) Lully’s Proserpine is a 17th-century ‘climate opera’ according to the composer’s modern evangelist Christophe Rousset. Proserpine is the Roman version of the Greek goddess Persephone, daughter of the fertility goddess Ceres, abducted and married by Pluto the god of the Underworld, plunging the earth into eternal winter. Jupiter intervenes so that Proserpine spends half the year with her husband in Hades, and the other half back on earth so that spring can return. The story inspired Lully to begin a new phase in his operas, with more expressive arias and ensembles, fewer dance movements and diversions, more focus on the drama and dialogue. Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel bring Proserpine to life with dramatic immediacy, effortless flow,…

One of the world’s most prestigious international opera competitions, the biennial BBC Cardiff Singer of the World was founded in 1983, and has been a launchpad for the careers of some of the world’s major stars. But due to ongoing renovations to the competition’s home venue of St David’s Hall, it’s had to take a hiatus and promises to return in 2027. Until then, you can still get your fix of ball gowns and bel canto (for one-night only) with this autumn’s Gala spectacular, recorded at the Wales Millennium Centre’s exquisite Donald Gordon Theatre. It will feature a line-up of world-class Cardiff competitors from across the years, including Natalya Romaniw, Katarina Karnéus, Ilker Arcayürek and Catriona Morison, with full orchestral accompaniment from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Don’t miss…