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The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Dinis Sousa bravely venture into Elgar at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with mixed success.

John Wilson brings the best out of both Holst's music and the players of the RSNO, though Alice Coote fails to hit the heights in Elgar's Sea Pictures. 

Hard driven and, at times, uncompromising ferocity for Mahler's Sixth Symphony, coupled with an engaging and sensitive account of Elgar's Sea Pictures.     

Katarina Karnéus displayed sovereign English diction, elegant musicianship and a sense of dramatic scale in Sea Pictures.

Painting pictures in music can often be stimulating. In a programme inspired by the sea and by pictorial art, Elim Chan, Catriona Morison and the BBC NOW reveal the underlying colour. 

The summer’s extreme heat and lack of rain have created drought conditions in Atlanta. As fate would have it, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra this week programmed two works drenched with water, albeit of the salty variety.

A well-crafted programme at Symphony Hall showcasing the best of English music from the first half of the last century.

Orient meets Occident in three performances of English works conducted by the Japanese maestro Tadaaki Otaka.

One of the pleasures of the BBC Proms is to survey the current state of our regional orchestras and I was really looking forward to the Hallé's visit with Mark Elder. Yet, at the end of the concert, I felt curiously unfulfilled.

The sea has been the inspiration for many concert works; Debussy’s La mer springs to mind immediately as perhaps the most popular, but in England during the first half of the 20th century nautical themes sustained an important presence. Amongst Delius’ Sea Drift, Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony and Britten’s Four Sea Interludes sits Frank Bridge’s short and splendid suite The Sea.

Although Mendelssohn and Elgar lived in different eras and composed in very different styles, a common thread runs through their works featured in Hong Kong Philharmonic’s performance on Saturday – all of them draw their inspiration from the British Isles.As well-heeled youngsters in the 19th century were wont to do, Mendelssohn embarked on a tour of Europe as part of his education.