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Candida Thompson’s performance of Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel with understated beauty, immaculate phrasing and restrained emotion, steals the show.

Soloists and choir, headed by a spellbinding Christian Gerhaher, brought real lustre to Schumann’s treatment of Goethe’s magnum opus.

In his 2016 opera Blank Out, Dutch composer Michel van der Aa has managed to create a new kind of operatic ‘reality’ that resonates powerfully with today’s Zeitgeist. Highly recommended.

Bach’s Magnificat featured superlative solos from both singers and musicians, but the RCO and Iván Fischer reached a higher plane in a beautifully crafted and optimistic Brahms’ First Symphony.

Superlative vocal and instrumental soloists, led by Michael Schade as a vividly intense Evangelist, impress in Bach’s St John Passion at the Concertgebouw.

Robert White's Lamentations bring a programme of English polyphony to a memorable climax.

In “Far from Home” reed quintet Calefax and the Nederlands Kamerkoor performed music around the theme of loneliness, loss and exile.

The Koorbiënnale in Haarlem is a biannual festival, organized for the sixth time this year. The opening night consisted of four exciting modern pieces and the world premiere of a new work by the Latvian composer Ēriks Eŝenvalds. The first piece played was Daan Manneke’s Topos for chorus and harmonium. It is a song cycle set to four poems by Arthur Rimbaud.