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

A traditional Lieder programme at the Edinburgh International Festival brings songs concerned with love, celebrating its joys but more often lamenting its loss and its pains. 

With Malcolm Martineau, the Latvian mezzo delivered poise and polish and transcendent Rückert Lieder. 

Netrebko put together a potpourri showcasting her immense vocal gifts as well as her versatility.

Winner of Cardiff Singer of the World, Scottish mezzo Catriona Morrison charms the enthusiastic audience with her varied programme of romantic songs.

The opening of the Duparc rippled diaphanously in Martineau's hands as the seductive but pure silver of Karg's voice.

It was an afternoon of pure delight as Anna Netrebko presented a full program of Russian art songs acompanied by an excellent pianist colleague.

Gansch and Martineau fail to dazzle in an unchallenging programme of bucolic and playful Lieder.

Elina Garanča was alluring in a lovely recital of Brahms, Duparc and Rachmaninov with pianist Malcolm Martineau. 

Technically dazzling performances are curiously subdued at Cadogan Hall on Monday lunchtime chamber prom.

Centered around the later, lesser-known composers of art song, tonight’s programme started with a first half of melancholy Hugo Wolf Lieder. Both Schubert and Schumann wrote settings of Goethe’s unhappy Harfenspieler, but evidently Wolf was unsatisfied, as, on principle, he avoided setting texts which he thought had been successfully treated before.

Susan Graham is the mezzo representative of the generation of American singers, including Barbara Bonney, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw and Sylvia McNair, who rose to prominence in the mid to late 1980s and distinguished themselves internationally with their superlative techniques, gorgeous lyric instruments, and impeccable professionalism.

If I were to create a ‘Top Trumps’-style league table of composers and their music, I would give Franz Schubert full marks in the ‘Beauty’ category. There is something so humane in the music of this tortured young soul, something that touches a wellspring of the emotion, beauty and pain of living and loving.

It was a rare opportunity: a chance to experience Olivier Messiaen’s Harawi , a song-cycle rarely-performed on account of its considerable demands on singer and pianist: most would consider very carefully before taking it on. Inspired by Wagner’s version of the Tristan and Isolde legend and its Love-Death (Liebestod) ending, it is the first of a trilogy.

Florian Boesch reminded me of the terror I felt as a nine year-old boy treble: I had to walk home in the dark after rehearsing Schubert's version of The Erlking, with phantoms following.

Leeds Lieder+, the northern biennial festival of art song, began on Friday night with Bright is the Ring of Words. Advertised as a celebration of British verse, the evening featured settings of the words of Lord Byron, Robert Louis Stevenson and Shakespeare by a diverse range of composers including Mendelssohn, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Richard Strauss, Roger Quilter and John Dankworth.

German baritone Roman Trekel, who made a rare London appearance replacing Dorothea Röschmann at the Wigmore Hall on Friday night, is a highly respected singer known especially for his many Wagner roles as well as for his Lieder interpretation. I first encountered him singing Wolfram in Tannhaüser at the Bayreuth Festival some years ago.