Northern Sinfonia in the cafés of Paris

Billed under the heading ‘Echoes of Youth’, this Kings Place programme is an attractive ragbag of unlikely bedfellows. 

A “Sound Unwrapped” programme, featuring Aurora Orchestra's trimmed line-up of five musicians and one sound engineer on electronics, proves to be an absolute success. 

Das Lied von der Erde may have been down-sized but it lost none of its stature in the Aurora Orchestra’s performance of a chamber arrangement of Mahler’s great song-symphony.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, goes the familiar phrase, and that can be applied in life to any number of things, including music. Were the father of harmony, Johann Sebastian Bach, still alive today, he would be beyond flattered.

You are sitting in the choir stalls of the Royal Festival Hall, watching the ceramic artist and writer Edmund de Waal address you, his back to an enormous sea of empty, grey, imposing seats. He is delivering a vivid narrative account of a day in the life of a young aristocratic Jewish boy in early 20th-century Vienna.

Harry Christophers brought his Sixteen to Manchester for a night of deeply romantic choral music at The Bridgewater Hall. Brahms’ Deutsches Requiem was a foreseeable success, but the seldom-heard Vocal Quartets, settings of Sternau, Schiller, Daumer and Goethe, were a delightful addition to the programme.The first set of Brahms quartets, Op.