Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Bradley Creswick

An affectionate Trout played by long-standing colleagues and friends from Royal Northern Sinfonia, along with Imogen Holst's Phantasy Quartet and Thomas Adès's fascinating Piano Quintet. 

A gloriously romantic performance by Lars Vogt and Royal Northern Sinfonia of Brahms' First Piano Concerto, complemented by Beethoven and Schumann.

Alexandre Bloch and Royal Northern Sinfonia throw down a challenge to any listener who thinks that Brahms is comfortable and easy with a radical reading of his Fourth Symphony.

The Royal Northern Sinfonia directed by Bradley Creswick and featuring the guitar soloist Craig Ogden offer an enterprising mixture of works and styles.

Laurence Cummings and Royal Northern Sinfonia round off their week of Bach concerts at Sage Gateshead with joyful orchestral music, and Bach's miniature comic opera.

As their contribution to The Sage Gateshead’s weekend-long “Fiddles on Fire” festival, Northern Sinfonia presented a selection of solo violin and string music that artfully blurred the distinctions between musical periods and genres, putting the emphasis firmly on the instrument itself, and on the spirited playing of their leader, Bradley Creswick.

On a day when Christians around the world reflect on suffering, torment and lost hope, but with the distant promise of light soon to return, the strings of Northern Sinfonia offered a programme that could serve as a secular, humanist alternative to Good Friday; music written in dark times and troubled places of 20th-century Europe, music that is at times brooding and disturbed, sadly nostalgic but

Northern Sinfonia’s season of music by Brahms and Schumann opened on Friday night with the very public statements of their first symphonies, and the following night members of Northern Sinfonia turned inwards to the introspective and private world of their chamber music.Brahms was introduced to Schumann by the great violinist Joseph Joachim, and the three men were great friends.

If three years is sufficient to constitute a tradition then, traditionally, a Lammermuir Festival ends with a sell-out concert in St. Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington. And if year three is sufficiently far along the line to break with tradition, then this year’s surprise was not box-office focused but based on choice of repertoire; not a Bach/Handel finish, but an all-French programme.

Like a puzzle where you have to get from one word to a completely different one by changing single letters, Friday evening’s concert from Northern Sinfonia travelled from the sparse simplicity of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, to the richness of a Brahms symphony in three utterly logical musical steps.

The three pieces performed this evening at the Sage Gateshead by Northern Sinfonia’s string section were very different in character, but they had one thing in common (apart from the alliterative composer names): they all were originally written as chamber pieces, and later arranged for orchestra.