Buscador de críticas de conciertos de música clásica, ópera, ballet y danza | Martyn Brabbins

La Primera Sinfonía de William Walton encontró en la Sinfónica de Galicia y Rumon Gamba unos traductores de primerísima fila

Urioste’s marvellous playing wedded gleaming tone to sure technique in The Lark Ascending.

A fascinating new companion piece to Elgar's Enigma Variations, from 14 contemporary composers, in celebration of Martyn Brabbins' 60th birthday, performed with enthusiasm by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

Effort and emotion collide at Gloucester Cathedral in music by Stravinsky, Berlioz and Walton

Kanneh-Mason's tone was luminous, his accuracy formidable, his commitment complete.

Daniel Kramer’s direction is a model of restraint compared to some of his earlier work for the company.

Fury, passion and loss from Martyn Brabbins and the BBCSO in an all-British programme. 

The music’s explosions of volume have an open-throated magnificence.

Dame Ethel Smyth's Mass in D enjoys a rare outing with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Martyn Brabbins. 

ENO's new production of Salome which opens the season features some commendable music-making, but is let down by a flawed concept and dull staging.

Thea Musgrave’s pictorial writing sits well next to an exhilarating Vaughan Williams Sea Symphony. 

Even if Hubert Parry was overshadowed by Holst and Vaughan Williams, this was a splendid concert of British music. 

Retour sur le concert du BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra au Concertgebouw de Bruges.

Fiona Shaw's production doesn't always get everything right, but Lucy Crowe's debut as the Countess is the defining success of the this revival.

A decent cast was unable to redeem a fundamentally dull opera that lacks the psycholgical complexity and tension of both the original Graham novel and its famous Hitchcock adaptation.

Sparks flew as two British music giants, Vaughan Williams and Birtwistle, collided at the Barbican.

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

Two world premières commissioned by the RCO are polar opposites in terms of emotional temperature.

An excellent performance of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s The Last Supper receiving its Scottish première, with Roderick Williams and Susan Bickley heading a luxury cast.

Three English composers receive fine performances from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

Iolenta et Perséphone sublimées : vibrant hommage à la Lumière par l'Opéra de Lyon.

Martyn Brabbins and the Rotterdam Philharmonic took the audience on a journey through our solar system in The Planets: An HD Odyssey.

If Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, then Boris Godunov is about five Russian dolls' worth.

Cardiff Castle hosted an entertaining bout of medieval jousting yesterday afternoon, but in the evening all eyes and ears turned to the vocal jousting in St David’s Hall.

Grand Holst and the première of Mark Bowden's A Violence of Gifts, performed with bombastic gusto and colour.

An original and dynamic performance of Brahms' Symphony no. 1 makes up for run-of-the-mill Wagner and Strauss. 

There was an inundation of the sound of John Tavener's Flood of Beauty at the Barbican on Sunday, with the Britten Sinfonia conducted by Martyn Brabbins.

  Last-minute Beamish replacement is a treat alongside accomplished Gurney and Walton.

As a very generous birthday present for ‘Accrington’s Finest’, Harrison Birtwistle, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Martin Brabbins pulled out all the stops to give a revelatory performance of the composer’s most Wagnerian opera, Gawain.

Thea Musgrave given deserved attention by Guildhall musicians, BBC Singers and BBC Symphony orchestra in Total Immersion at the Barbican. 

Arcomis is a Cardiff-based organisation concerned with the promotion and commissioning of new music. Modest yet effective, most of their work is at an essential grass-root level, yet, seemingly out of nowhere, they have conjured an incredibly bold and wide-ranging three-day festival of brass based at Cardiff’s St David’s Hall, the Cardiff University Music Department and the Royal Welsh College of

Karlheinz Stockhausen has done rather well out of this weekend’s instalment of Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival, with his music featuring in all three of the concerts as well as the mouthwatering additional event “Breakfast with Stockhausen”.

The scene in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin where the peasants, weary from gathering in the harvest, sing and dance for the woman who owns the estate (and, for that matter, owns them) is perhaps not the best example of gritty social realism in opera.

On the day after the announcement of the programme for this year’s BBC Proms, the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave us yet another concert worthy of that great festival. Under the experienced baton of Martyn Brabbins they took three centuries of music in their stride and at the end of the concert I was left feeling that musical life in London would be so much less exciting without the BBC.

One of the strange things about classical music is that we often hear pieces played without their original context. Ballet music is often performed as simply orchestral music, and many composers have made suites out of ballet or film music in order to make this even easier.

Anyone who worries for the health of contemporary composition obviously wasn’t at the Southbank Centre this Sunday, where the London Sinfonietta presented a whole afternoon and evening’s worth of new music in and around the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Professional performances of English operas are rare – they always have been – and it is presumably the 60th anniversary of The Pilgrim’s Progress specifically that has prompted this 2012 revival. It seems that without a significant anniversary to justify blowing the dust off a score, English operas tend to lie unheeded – the exception of course is Benjamin Britten.

The music of Herbert Howells has long been a fixture in British churches but continues to be absent from our concert halls. It’s true that much of his output, and almost all of his most popular works, are for unaccompanied choir or choir and organ, but his orchestral works include two piano concertos, a fantasia for cello and orchestra and several works for string orchestra among their number.

The seventh of the chamber music Proms this year brought together two of the greatest composers of the early 20th century. Though Debussy was twelve years Schoenberg’s senior, of the two works performed it is Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire which was written first, in 1912, with Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola and harp following three years later in 1915.

Sir George Dyson (1883–1964) is now principally remembered by the generations of grown-up schoolchildren who sang his many songs for educational use, and more recently by church choirs and congregations for his religious music.

The first night of the Proms was, in this year of Olympic celebrations and the Diamond Jubilee, a tribute to all things English, featuring an impressive range of singers and a (somewhat appropriate) relay team of stellar English conductors. The programme began with a strange mixture of old and new.

‘Madonna’ and ‘synthesizer’ are two words which seldom go together in a classical-music context, but Jonathan Harvey defies our expectations with delight.

A work scheduled to last nearly two hours could be excused for starting with a long slow build up, but Havergal Brian’s massive Gothic Symphony (the longest symphony ever composed) bursts onto the scene with a brisk and bustling march-like flourish, contrasted briefly with a delicate violin solo that reminds us that this is very much an English composition.