Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Susan Gritton

After decades as a period instrument revolutionary, the 87-year old conductor bows out with “Dr Haydn's London Academy”, an entertaining recreation of concert-going in the 1790s.

At 82, Sir Roger Norrington may have slowed down his conducting career but I’m very pleased to report that he still loves stirring things up at his concerts.

Somewhere in the region of 180 singers and instrumentalists faced Andrew Manze as he took the podium at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. Could he handle them? There was never any doubt.

Stephen Medcalf's meticulous staging of Tchaikovsky's bitter masterpiece is lit up by Jung Soo Yun's Lensky, giving a direct injection of emotions: verismo before its time.

The Teatro Real crowns his Britten cycle with a canonic War Requiem conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado and superbly sung by John Mark Aisnley and Jacques Imbrailo. 

Seven works by English composers created a journey from beauty to death as Remembrance day approaches. There wasn't much dwelling on the horrors of war itself, but plenty of human emotion and a sense of life sadly lost.

An unrepeatable performance of Britten's profound choral masterpiece, the War Requiem, conducted by Andris Nelsons at the Proms.

Rattle, the OAE and the Choir of the Enlightenment provide an uplifting and inspiring account of Haydn's Creation. 

Conflict across the world pours into our homes through the immediacy of television, and we can now see harrowing images unavailable when Britten took up the commission to write a piece for the consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in 1961/62.

The scene in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin where the peasants, weary from gathering in the harvest, sing and dance for the woman who owns the estate (and, for that matter, owns them) is perhaps not the best example of gritty social realism in opera.

The sea has been the inspiration for many concert works; Debussy’s La mer springs to mind immediately as perhaps the most popular, but in England during the first half of the 20th century nautical themes sustained an important presence. Amongst Delius’ Sea Drift, Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony and Britten’s Four Sea Interludes sits Frank Bridge’s short and splendid suite The Sea.

Willy Decker’s production of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, which originated at La Monnaie in Brussels in 1994 and was revived at London’s Royal Opera House in 2004 and 2011, has now reached Tokyo. The work opened the new season of the New National Theatre Tokyo, the capital’s main opera house, currently celebrating its 15th anniversary.

Sir George Dyson (1883–1964) is now principally remembered by the generations of grown-up schoolchildren who sang his many songs for educational use, and more recently by church choirs and congregations for his religious music.

The first night of the Proms was, in this year of Olympic celebrations and the Diamond Jubilee, a tribute to all things English, featuring an impressive range of singers and a (somewhat appropriate) relay team of stellar English conductors. The programme began with a strange mixture of old and new.

There was a definite buzz about London’s Southbank Centre on the evening of 16th February, for this was the night of the second concert in the Philharmonia Orchestra’s ‘The Still Point of the Turning World’ series, which began last month to huge critical acclaim (see my review).

A work scheduled to last nearly two hours could be excused for starting with a long slow build up, but Havergal Brian’s massive Gothic Symphony (the longest symphony ever composed) bursts onto the scene with a brisk and bustling march-like flourish, contrasted briefly with a delicate violin solo that reminds us that this is very much an English composition.

The Holland Festival boasts quite an impressive relationship with Britten and his works. Tonight’s chamber opera, The Rape of Lucretia was first performed at the festival in 1947 with Britten, Peter Pears and Kathleen Ferrier (for whom the opera was written) and the English Opera Group. Tonight’s performance with Oliver Knussen at the helm is another proud continuation of this tradition.

An element of conflict inhabits the combination of an evening out and a requiem mass. This thought ran through my mind as I approached Edinburgh's Usher Hall, the sunny foreground of which was populated by happy-looking concert-goers greeting friends.

This near sell-out concert at the Barbican was intended as a purely vocal programme, ranging from 1710 to 1736 and featuring two female vocalists accompanied by baroque specialists The English Concert. Expertly led from the organ by Harry Bicket, the orchestra played with spirit and their rendering of Handel's Concerto Grosso Op.