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Eva Ollikainen conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra and soloist Johannes Moser in the UK premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s BBC co-commissioned Cello Concerto. 

At the Philharmonie, David Robertson steps in for Kirill Petrenko for a concert all about the wonders of nature, featuring Varèse, Srnka and Beethoven.

The soprano seemed to be duetting with players as much as conducting them in Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

Walton's Belshazzar's Feast crowns a dynamic, daring programme from Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra. 

A fond farewell to the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra from its Principal Conductor for the past nine seasons.

Zubin Mehta and the Berlin Philharmonic have an extraordinary relationship lasting over five decades. In three performances in the Philharmonie, Mehta paired a piece from the core of his romantic repertoire with a new percussion concerto.

An intriguing programme marked by diversity and novelty from two world-beating ensembles. 

A Total Immersion day exploring the works of Edgar Varèse at the Barbican. 

An evening of frivolousness and solemnity.

The Concertgebouworkest's series based on 'the sublime' continues with an eclectic programme of Ockeghem, Ligeti, Varèse and Ravel at the Concertgebouw. 

Ludovic Morlot conducts the New York première of the piece that won this year's Pulitzer Prize, Become Ocean, and pairs it with Varèse and Debussy.

The San Francisco Contemporary Chamber Music Players headlined the third night of the Sweet Thunder Festival with a program of electroacoustic warhorses and world premières.

The centrepiece of Nonclassical’s “Pioneers of Percussion” festival was a rousing marathon of a concert at Scala, a large (mostly) rock venue near King’s Cross. It was a rich, varied, high-energy, happily chaotic affair that lasted into the wee hours of the morning.

The flute is one of the most venerable musical instruments we have (the earliest archaeological records have been dated to over 35,000 years ago), and as Claire Chase proved Thursday night at The Kitchen in Chelsea, it retains an energy that ensures it will continue to play a vital role in the future of concert music.

What drew John Cage and Frank Zappa into the same programme was their mutual admiration of Edgard Varèse, at its most striking in their use of percussion. Somehow I feel Cage would have been delighted to be the one out of step with an otherwise perfectly symmetrical programme. Flanking the interval were performances of Varèse’s Ionisation (1929–31).

Hot on the heels of the Urban Classic Prom came this, the BBC 6 Music Prom. Yet another first in this year’s Proms saw BBC Radios 3 and 6 Music bring together the likes of Cerys Matthews, Laura Marling, Xenakis, The Stranglers, Varèse and the London Sinfonietta, and produce a programme comprising styles that might loosely be described as “alternative”, from the fringes of pop to punk rock via mode

If a single word can express disappointment without surprise, it would capture my feeling upon surveying the seats before this concert of 20th-century music at the Usher Hall. My heart went out to the musicians. However, upon seeing Ilan Volkov’s happy and positive demeanour and hearing the first notes, all such negativity dissolved, never to return.

The centenary of the première of The Rite of Spring – now that is something to celebrate. The Philharmonia, led by chief conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, did it in style, with Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune by Claude Debussy (who of course famously performed the Rite with Stravinsky on the piano), Amériques by Edgard Varèse (who was present at the première, and very much influenced by it), and a vi

Celebrating the work of emerging artists and their 20th-century heritage, the LSO Futures concert series came to a spectacular close this weekend at the Barbican. In a two-part programme devised by conductor François-Xavier Roth, chamber and orchestral forces reckoned with the challenges posed to the symphonic tradition.

When we think of America, Dvořák and Milhaud are not among the first set of composers to come to mind, but it turns out they deserve to be among the second.

As classical music ensembles strive to reach out to a broader audience, the search for different performing venues outside the traditional concert hall and church settings is a common goal among many. However, the 43 year-old concert series at Old First Concerts continues to present its successfully diverse array of concerts under the same roof: the Old First Presbyterian Church in San Francisco.

The Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, Amsterdam’s foremost modern classical music venue, opened the music season with a day dedicated to percussion. The first concert included Stravinsky’s Suite from L’histoire du soldat (1918) and Varèse’s Ionisation (1929-31) and Hyperprism (1922-23).

Despite knowing what was going to happen, it was a still surprising when, amid the chatter and bustle of the audience before the concert (there was a distinct lack of communal coughing before it started), the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain began Tuning Up.

Bravo to Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony for blowing the dust off of some of the boldest innovators America has produced. As part of a mini-festival at Carnegie Hall of 20th- and 21st-century composers who stretched musical and formal boundaries (to put it mildly), the program on Tuesday night was packed with rarely-played wonders.

On October 24th the grand-dame of Russian contemporary music, Sofia Gubaidulina, celebrates her 80th birthday. In order to commemorate this event, several concerts with her music were scheduled in Amsterdam for her presence – not least of all, the premiere of her new Concerto for Orchestra.

Pour leur première au nouveau festival de la Philharmonie, l'orchestre maison et le chef finlandais ont échoué à retranscrire toute la diversité expressive d'un programme pourtant séduisant sur le papier.

L’Ensemble intercontemporain et les étudiants du CNSMDP se sont rencontrés pour un concert monographique en deux parties aussi bien construit qu’interprété.

Modernité, brillance, rapport à l'histoire différent... le LA Phil a conquis le public parisien par son approche de la musique si rafraîchissante.

Vision pénétrante, lucide d'Alan Gilbert dirigeant l'Orchestre de Paris et intelligence sonore rare chez Marc-André Hamelin. Au programme : la Symphonie n°4 de Schumann, le Concerto pour la main gauche de Ravel, et Amériques de Varèse.

Programme pléthorique que celui de cette soirée ! A l’ordre du jour, un corpus d’œuvres mues par la passion, où J.S. Bach flirte avec Manoury et Vito Zuraj lance d’incessants clins d’œil à B.A. Zimmerman.

S'il existait, à l'image des ouragans, une échelle de puissance dans laquelle classer les concertos pour piano, nul doute que le second de Prokofiev se situerait au degré le plus élevé, dans la catégorie des machines les plus dévastatrices. Ce 14 janvier, Trifonov a résolu comme peut-être personne avant lui la largeur de vision de ces pages immortelles.