Sala: Howard Assembly Room, Leeds

Entitled “Passion and Resurrection”, this exquisite concert from Stile Antico unfolded as an exploration of music written in response to Holy Week.One of the group’s most striking characteristics is their decision to work without a conductor, a move which can at times produce chamber music of the highest quality.

Although this was ostensibly a recital featuring the music of two composers, a third, much less venerable one, also managed to leave his mark on proceedings. The figure in question is Carl Czerny, the one-time pupil of Beethoven’s whose banal piano studies proved to be the springboard for the first of Claude Debussy’s own, far more inventive forays into the genre.

Delius is a composer who is often misunderstood, the English pastoralism of works like On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring hardly representative of either his cosmopolitan life or the breadth of his output.

By adding Schubert’s Winterresie to her repertoire Alice Coote joins a long tradition of female interpreters including the likes of Christine Schäfer and her own mentor Brigitte Fassbaender. In this performance of Schubert’s great song cycle, however, it was the piano playing of Julius Drake, rather than Coote’s singing, which penetrated to the heart of the work.

New composers usually find it difficult, or rather near-impossible, to have their work performed in professional circumstances in front of a critical audience.

To add insight and context to their performances of Das Rheingold, Opera North have been staging a number of events exploring Wagner, his music and the production of his operas. On Saturday evening their Howard Assembly Room played host to The Cross in the Mountains, an evening of German choral music composed in the age of the Ring Cycle.

In the run up to their widely anticipated concert staging of Wagner's Das Rheingold this summer, Opera North are providing us with a number of events at their Howard Assembly Room which aim to explore different aspects of the Ring Cycle.

Since emerging from the Guildhall School of Music in the early 1990s, Roderick Williams has enjoyed a steady and critically acclaimed career.