Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Anonymous | English

ORA Singers directed by Suzi Digby in a spiritual performance contrasting ancient and modern sacred works performed in the historic St Kohn's Kirk, opening 2025 Perth Festival.

Rich sounding viols, lively percussion and spicy theorbo and guitar in eclectic consort music from Jordi Savall and Hesperian XXI in their 50th year. 

Jordi Savall explores the music of Maurice Ravel within the context of the French Baroque and beyond. 

Countertenor Reginald Mobley and the Academy of Ancient Music shine in an alternative history of English Baroque, with a new work by Roderick Williams. 

Once again Voces8 entertain a packed audience with an eclectic programme sung with thrilling precision and excellent presentation. 

Tenor Nicky Spence and mezzo Václava Krejčí Housková thrill with a theatrical take on Janáček's The Diary of One Who Disappeared with pianist Julius Drake. 

Hespèrion XXI dazzle us with virtuosity as they celebrate musical Europe in the heart of Westminster.

The early music ensemble peppered its diverse program with the rollicking play A Christmas Messe. While not all arrangements worked well, expertise and emotion made for a pleasurably unique performance.

The complexities of Istanbul's rich culture and history, explored in a heady mixture of music from Bach to Afganistan, played by the Melodies of Istanbul Orchestra, directed by Hakan Güngör. 

Rachmaninov had a strange fascination with the Dies irae chant. For last night’s concert, Andrés Orozco-Estrada prefaced the Symphonic Dances with a rendition of this Gregorian Chant.

In the tiny Baltic state of Latvia, music loving locals are hell-bent on going for Baroque.

The Sixteen launched us into the final days before Christmas with a well-thought out and diverse combination of songs on The Three Kings.

Long-forgotten Spanish guitar music brought to life in a scintillating concert by Le Poème Harmonique at Wigmore Hall.

From Strauss's tone poem to Telemann's instrumental suite, Don Quixote's winning fantasy has captured the imagination of composers through the ages. 

A three hour Bach "meditation", with Bach mixed with Kurtág, various other modern pieces and free jazz improvisation all sounded a bit radical. But the results were extraordinary. 

Getting a glimpse of a next generation of promising artists is always a fascinating pursuit. Seeing the Zurich Dance Academy’s 12th annual “Footprints” performance was no exception.

Music from Anne Boleyn's Songbook in a highly evocative and expertly performed programme at Cadogan Hall. 

Sounds of Mali, Brazil, Spain, Mexico and Madagascar blended to perfection with Colombia to create a masterpiece. 

Jordi Savall, Hespèrion XXI and Tembembe Ensamble Continuo create an evening of magic in the Cartagenan hills.

L’Arpeggiata brought the sensuous heat and vibrancy of Catalonia to London's Wigmore Hall in a concert featuring songs and music from the Aragon region of Spain.

L’Ospedale sounds like it should be a newly written opera about the NHS, but actually, it's a 350 year old piece. It makes for an hour's delectable light operatic entertainment.

A tantalising selection of Italian Baroque music from Andreas Scholl, Avi Avital and friends at Wigmore Hall.

Amadè Players’ concert entitled “Forgotten Vienna” was conceived by the conductor and scholar Nicholas Newland, who has a strong affinity with the music of eighteenth-century Bohemian composers.

The Sixteen and Opera North Children’s Chorus close Spitalfields Music Winter Festival in sparkling fashion with Poulenc and Britten.

The Hilliard Ensemble celebrated their fortieth birthday at the Spitalfields Music Winter Festival, at St Leonard's Church, Shoreditch.

New York Polyphony brought Dallas residents a refreshing interlude to the post-Thanksgiving consumerist madness, with a recital of Christmas music old and new.

The ensemble XVII-21 Le Baroque Nomade was warmly received in its North American debut Friday evening at Montréal’s Bourgie Hall. Their concert, titled “Venice, Mirror to the World”, was presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Splendore a Venezia: Art and Music from the Renaissance to Baroque in Venice” at the adjoining Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal.

Somewhere between a concert and a scientific experiment, tonight’s Tales from Babel at the Royal Academy of Music was a fascinating study into the way we process text and language. Having been given a response handset when we entered the room, the first half of the concert was a rendition of a work by Christopher Fox which gave the concert it’s name; Tales from Babel.

The theme of Polish music running subtly throughout this year’s BBC Proms is mostly evident through late 19th- and 20th-century repertoire: Szymanowski, Tchaikovsky’s “Polish” Symphony, lots of Lutosławski. Perhaps oddly, Chopin hasn’t featured at all.

The City of London Festival this year is ambitiously programmed, with a number of common themes running through the events.

Amidst all the hustle and bustle, the humming and buzzing of post-work Friday-night drinkers lining the sun-kissed streets of Spitalfields, who’d have thought that in the church at the very heart of that lively London area would be a man, standing alone, singing music written 800 years ago? Music from another human-inhabited world, so alien to our modern-day, Commercial Street lives, and yet still

The medieval garden was an enchanted place, a place where the beauties of nature took on formal and symbolic qualities, and the perfect setting for the coded artifice of courtly love.

I Fagiolini is a vocal group I have been trying to see live for quite a while now, so I was extremely excited to be attending the London offering of Insalata I Fagiolini at Cadogan Hall.

The theme of tonight’s concert, revealed the programme notes, was that of “marking time and preserving timeless values” – Christmas being a season that connects the past with the present.

I was in two minds whether to opt for this concert, as I’d have another one to review the following day, but from the first note it was clearly the right decision.

When we look back to the disease and mistreatment that arrived with the European colonisation of South America, the role of music in the whole affair is not often the first issue that comes to mind.

In his 1995 book Text and Act, the musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote of the historically-informed performance movement, “the very recent concept of historical authenticity is implicitly projected back into historical periods that never knew it.

Frequent concertgoers in our modern age will be all too aware of the irritation factor of mobile phones going off during performance. The King’s Singers, however, make a feature of the phenomenon and take it to another level. This world-class ensemble delighted a packed Hereford Cathedral, the closing concert of their 2011/12 season coinciding with the Three Choirs Festival.

In 1993, by some strange musical alchemy, a creative partnership was born that has gone on to bear some remarkable fruit. On Officium, stylish jazz and classical label ECM brought together The Hilliard Ensemble – a vocal quartet known for the precision with which it had tackled and animated austere soundworlds from Perotin to Pärt – and Norwegian jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek.

Saturday evening’s concert saw the coming together of two world-class ensembles from opposite ends of the world: Australia’s national orchestra, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and the world-renowned British vocal group the Hilliard Ensemble.

It has been nearly twenty years since the Hilliard Ensemble and Jan Garbarek released their first recording, Officium, in which the austere harmonies of medieval sacred music sung by the male voice quartet were augmented by Garbarek’s beautiful, freewheeling saxophone melodies.

Generally when we think of the first great flowering of English church music, our minds go to the giants of the Tudor age – Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons and their contemporaries. But as we learned this evening in the company of the Orlando Consort, the rich tradition of English choral music has even earlier origins, back in the priories of the Middle Ages.