Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Tadaaki Otaka

Strong performances of Bacewicz and Lutosławski in Tadaaki Otaka's final outing with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales at the Proms, with technically commanding and sincere Rachmaninov from Vadym Kholodenko.

The BBC NOW gave us two hearty Russian works and celebrated the lunar landing with a world premiere of Huw Watkins' The Moon.

The RPO were on ripe form in works that still need such fine advocacy, and which deserved a much larger audience.

Luscious orchestral and choral sounds bring Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé to shimmering life.

 The BBC National Orchestra of Wales on fine form showcasing British composers, with a little help from Chloe Hanslip and Ailish Tynan

Orient meets Occident in three performances of English works conducted by the Japanese maestro Tadaaki Otaka.

The BBC National Orchestra of Wales crossed the river to England to deliver an evening of the music of Brahms culminating in the giant Symphony no. 1 in C minor, Op. 68.

The joy of listening to Brahms’s piano concertos in a concert hall – especially one with such fine acoustics as St David’s Hall, Cardiff – is that textures and harmonies that can sound thick, muddy and ill-balanced in recordings come across with all their intricate, closely-woven contrapuntal writing clear and thrilling.

“Three concertos and an epitaph” is how the Wales Millennium Centre summed up tonight’s concert. Not only did the selected programme focus almost exclusively on three composers’ essays in the concerto genre, but it also spanned a narrow period of time within the mid 20th-century: 22 years in total, or 38 if one includes Andrzej Panufnik’s Katyn Epitaph.

Prom 23 served up a menu of English music from the first half of the 20 century in all its variety, with impressionism by Delius, the lush strings of Vaughan Williams, heroic brass from Ireland, and jazzy, sophisticated excitement from Walton.The programme opened with a warmly affectionate performance of Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.