Find articles | Evan Dickerson

It is often interesting to hear performers one knows well in a different setting, and this concert was a case in point for me. The London Philharmonic Orchestra have performed often in Eastbourne since the 1930s and at the Congress Theatre for the past seventeen seasons, but this was my first visit to the venue. Based on this concert, I am hopeful that it will not be my last.

22 November 2012 would have been Benjamin Britten’s 99th birthday. Wigmore Hall marked the occasion with the first concert in a series of nine events in November and December. However, rather than focusing exclusively on Britten’s music, it built towards the climax that saw Britten’s angst-ridden late masterpiece Phaedra searingly performed.

The past two seasons have seen the Chopin Society UK celebrate the composer’s bicentenary and its own 40th anniversary. The programme of monthly concerts that it puts on continues to feature a roster of well-known artists alongside those that deserve to be better known. The Yugoslav-born French-American pianist Eugen Indjic falls into the latter category.

Josep Pons strode purposefully onto the Barbican stage to conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Haydn’s “Clock” Symphony. The first movement opened by way of an Adagio laden with a suitable sense of portent, the layers of writing for the strings being clearly articulated to bring this out.

In terms of programming this recital at St John’s Smith Square offered something out of the ordinary. There are not that many concerts these days where the audience is faced with an item of core repertoire, followed by some semi-neglected repertoire by a mainstream composer, a work by a totally neglected composer, and then a final flurry of instrumental fireworks. Schumann’s Violin Sonata no.

Marian Anderson, the famed African-American contralto, once remarked of Kathleen Ferrier, “My God, what a voice – and what a face!” This concert was a Centenary Celebration of Ferrier’s art at the Wigmore Hall, and I reflected (not for the first time) how aptly Anderson’s words could also apply to Alice Coote, the evening’s distinguished soloist.

The Chilingirian Quartet’s second concert at the Kings Place Festival followed barely twenty minutes after their preceding concert had concluded. Three factors were common between both events: the playing of two works without an interval, the presence of Joseph Haydn, and, most importantly, a uniformly high standard of musicianship.

For the first of two short concerts that the Chilingirian Quartet presented on the opening evening of the Kings Place Festival, they focused on two quartets by Joseph Haydn. Both were written in 1793 following a previous highly successful trip Haydn had made to England, and were intended to satisfy the demand of London audiences.The String Quartet in C, Op. 74 no.

My first encounter with the Finnish partnership of Helena Juntunen and her accompanist Eveliina Kytömäki was as participants in the 2007 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition. Back then, I noted how accomplished Helena Juntunen was as a recitalist, whilst Eveliina Kytömäki was an idiomatic and sympathetic pianist who brought out the feeling in all she played.

Across town the Proms were sounding their final hurrah for another year, but Wigmore Hall opened their 2012/13 season with an altogether more serious repertoire of Rachmaninov and Shostakovich songs.