Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Purcell Room

Musical cross-pollination came to life in London Sinfonietta’s electrifying performance, in a seamless blend of theatre, history and virtuosic playing.

The vitality and combustible energy of Ustvolskaya's music is unleashed thanks to a fiery spark from Siwan Rhys. 

Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Aurora Orchestra serve up an over-the-top confection at Purcell Room in Southbank Centre. 

Schoenberg's modernist masterpiece gets lost in a fog of words and feral newsprint at the Southbank Centre's Purcell Room. 

The charismatic Rakhi Singh leads the Manchester Collective in fine performances of Mazzoli, Leith, Shaw and Shostakovitch.

Two world premieres from Mark Bowden and Colin Matthews breath life into the Southbank's Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Fet a Mà's Cru is a delightfully touching, hilarious piece at the Southbank Centre as part of the London International Mime Festival.

“Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it”. These are Morton Feldman’s own words on his Patterns in a Chromatic Field. And they are a concise and accurate description of what occurs during the piece. Patterns... is one of Feldman’s later works, composed in 1981.

This Sunday, pianist Karim Said returned to the Southbank Centre to put Arnold Schoenberg under the microscope for a third and last time. Performing as part of the International Piano Series 2012/13 and the cataclysmic Rest is Noise festival, Said’s concerts have focused on the genesis of the Second Viennese School.

This Wednesday, London Sinfonietta presented Luke Bedford: In Portrait – a concert with a format that seemed almost too good to be true. In a short programme combining Luke Bedford’s Wonderful No-Headed Nightingale (2011–12), Renewal (2012–13) and Gérard Grisey’s Périodes (1974), conductor Sian Edwards and the London Sinfonietta beckoned us into a world of shifting soundscapes.

This Richard Thomas Foundation concert at Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room introduced us to two completely new works, and presented two slightly older pieces too for good measure. All were beautifully played by a top selection of performers, making for an excellent demonstration of the power of new music.

An International Piano Series event, Karim Said’s recital this Sunday was also part of the Southbank Centre’s Berlin in the ’20s and ’30s weekend, a mini-series within the larger series (super-series, perhaps) which is the year-long Rest is Noise festival. He presented a short series of works by Arnold Schoenberg and his composition students Anton von Webern and Hanns Eisler.

Celebrating the centenary of Polish composer Witold Lutosławski’s birth, the Philharmonia Orchestra have embarked on Woven Words, a series also involving the Royal College of Music. The title, an English translation of Lutosławski’s Paroles tissées (1965), invites audiences to consider a multitude of questions concerning music and meaning.

Leo is a gravity-defying solo directed by Daniel Brière and performed, in its most recent incarnation, by William Bonnet. The show is based around a single illusion: Bonnet’s live performance on one half of the stage is filmed, rotated ninety degrees and then projected back onto the other half. It’s like watching a tennis match as my eyes dart from side to side.

The late composer Jonathan Harvey, who died last month at age 73, described his Speakings (2008) as the most complicated and ambitious work he had ever written. A 25-minute composition for orchestra and electronics, the piece certainly warrants that description on the levels of scale and logistics alone.

The story of how composers Morton Feldman and John Cage met is now famous: in 1950, feeling dismayed by an audience’s discourteous reaction to Anton Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21 at a New York Philharmonic performance, Feldman decided to leave the concert. In the lobby he encountered Cage, who was there for the same reason.

During the first half of this London Sinfonietta concert, I scribbled the phrase 'Lightly anarchic streak' in my notes, referring to the formal daring and the conspicuous rock music influence evident in various pieces.

This weekend saw the Southbank Centre embark on an ambitious festival programme of rarely performed composer Conlon Nancarrow. One of the main reasons Nancarrow’s music is rarely performed is that the vast majority of what he wrote was for the archaic player piano.

Violinist Alda Dizdari may just have taken a while to settle in to the performance, but the opening Debussy Sonata did not come across particularly well. Piano and violin didn’t quite lock in together and the Debussy ‘wash’ of sound, akin to an impressionist watercolour, was not apparent – the tone was harsh and rhythms angular.

This January’s Park Lane Group Young Artists Series is featuring 28 exceptional young performers over five concerts. Each concert further features a piece by a different contemporary composer each night, as well as one by an older, ‘Linked Composer’. On Monday the composer featured was Thomas Adès, who was ‘linked’ to Gerald Barry. The Muse Piano Quintet performed Barry's Piano Quartet no.

London-based Venezuelan pianist Clara Rodriguez and friends brought the heady and exotic rhythms and sounds of South America to a windy Southbank in a delightfully relaxed concert of chamber music at the Purcell Room.