Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Byrd

Restoring the music and the color of a 400-year old piece of musical theatre, New York City renaissance ensemble Sonnambula teams up with bass-baritone Davóne Tines to present A Black Masque.

Tenebrae transforms the Elbphilharmonie into a living instrument, exploring centuries of choral music through spatialised sound, Pärt’s tintinnabuli, Renaissance masterpieces and contemporary innovations in a vivid acoustic experiment.

Former Cliburn winner Vadym Kholodenko returns to Singapore in mesmerising and thrilling form.

Once again Voces8 entertain a packed audience with an eclectic programme sung with thrilling precision and excellent presentation. 

The Sixteen offer glorious tones, smooth polyphonic lines and vivid word paintings at the National Concert Hall. 

From the oppressed Catholic minority of 16th-century England to contemporary settings, The Gesualdo Six bring their Wishing Tree programme to Auckland. 

The fantasia proved an anchoring theme for this rising young pianist's varied, satisfying recital programme.

The Sixteen contribute intimate Music for Reflection to Voces8's Live from London series.

VOCES8 perform choral music spanning 800 years, including a BBC commission from Alexia Sloane, with great energy, articulation and virtuosity in an impressive Proms debut at Cadogan Hall.

The Sixteen enchant the audience in Sydney with an intelligently-created programme of British composers.

The early music ensemble peppered its diverse program with the rollicking play A Christmas Messe. While not all arrangements worked well, expertise and emotion made for a pleasurably unique performance.

The Scottish Ensemble is joined by I Fagiolini in a Winter Chorale linking ancient and modern music for Advent and Christmas. 

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

Britten’s Ceremony of Carols with pieces by Tavener, MacMillan and Lauridsen contrast with Byrd and Dowland in a thoughtful and moving performance of Christmas musical icons from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus.

Shakespeare songs turned out to be more of a Shakespeare feast starring Antonio Pappano, Ian Bostridge and the exceptional Eve Best.

Ancient and modern Shakespeare settings, and music from Shakespeare's contemporaries given tender and passionate readings in a varied programme from Fretwork and Stile Antico.

Inhibited by a cold and unable to give a full 100%, Andreas Scholl pulled off a solid 99 in a recital of early English music with harpsichordist Tamar Halperin.

A magical, brilliantly conceived programme of Byrd, Tallis and Arvo Pärt

Britten Sinfonia and Voices directed by Eamonn Dougan courageously plumb the depths of humanity’s despair in music ancient and modern

A ravishing performance, with Shakespeare’s words delivered primarily through the prism of living composers.

Dame Emma Kirkby and Jakob Lindberg delight with an intimate and varied programme on the theme “Heroines of the Golden Age” at Brighton Early Music Festival. 

The choir tackle an ambitious, if overly long programme of Advent-themed works with mixed results.

In a celestial choir-off, one could imagine the Tallis Scholars giving the Seraphims and Cherubims a run for their money.

How would the Choir of King's College, Cambridge cope in the difficult acoustic of Sydney Opera House? Under the direction of Stephen Cleobury, they delivered a polished programme.

Fantasias for viol trio performed by members of Phantasm illustrate the inventiveness of England's best composers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Hilliard Ensemble celebrated their fortieth birthday at the Spitalfields Music Winter Festival, at St Leonard's Church, Shoreditch.

The Tallis Scholars have been one of the foremost Renaissance vocal ensemble since their inception forty years ago. This was the ensemble’s first visit to New Zealand (organised by Chamber Music New Zealand in partnership with the New Zealand Choral Federation and Dean Endowment Trust) and the performance quality made it worth every minute of the forty year wait.

On Saturday at St James’s Church, the Nonsuch Singers presented a captivating programme titled “To the Field of Stars”. It was a compelling mix of recent and old music, predominantly works by living composers and composers from the 16th century. It culminated in the première of Gabriel Jackson’s newly commissioned work To the Field of Stars.

The British vocal ensemble Stile Antico made an appearance in Cleveland on Friday evening, 11 October, at the Cathedral of St John the Evangelist, as part of their current American tour to perform a brilliant live rendition of their most recent album The Phoenix Rising.

Singing polyphonic music requires a specific sound. To be truly effective there must be a beautifully rounded and well blended choral sound, but at the same time the individual lines must be clearly decipherable within the overall texture. This is a balance that The Tallis Scholars seem to find effortless.

Some of England’s greatest choral music dates from the period of political and religious upheaval during the late 15th to early 17th centuries, when composers were having to adapt to new monarchs and changes to the church service almost as frequently as they would have changed their shirts.

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.

The Brandenburg Choral Festival is an enormous endeavour, with hundreds of concerts all over London, featuring all kinds of choral music and a diverse range of performers. Tonight we were in the beautiful church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, the heart of the festival, for a late-night concert of stunning Tallis, Byrd and Allegri by candlelight.

The theme of tonight’s concert, revealed the programme notes, was that of “marking time and preserving timeless values” – Christmas being a season that connects the past with the present.

The King’s Singers epitomise a cappella musicianship. The group was originally formed in the 1960s by choral scholars of King’s College, Cambridge (and one from Christ Church, Oxford), but its current membership includes members who were previously choral scholars at Oxford, and even one member from New Zealand.

“It is impossible to find anyone in the world today who is young and not ill,” muses André Breton in Chiaki Kawamata’s novel Death Sentences. “Youth itself is a kind of disease.” There is in youth something that exerts a powerful hold on the imagination. Its freshness, its arrogance, its promise – all of these building a magnetic aura that exerts a powerful hold on our consciousness.

Unless you’re actually performing it liturgically, it’s very difficult to know what to do with sacred music these days. The masses of Palestrina, the motets of Byrd, the cantatas of Bach – all seem to merit our attention today, but not for the religious reasons for which they were originally written.

In my notes for this evening’s concert by Renaissance, a chamber choir founded by the young singer, conductor and composer Ben Rowarth, one word kept recurring – “thoughtful”. This was a programme that had been carefully put together, and which was performed without any unnecessary flashiness or attempts to impress.

The Sixteen’s three appearances in the line-up for this year’s Spitalfields Music Festival showcase the breadth of their repertoire. On June 15 and 16, they will premiere Alan Roth’s new musical setting of Beckett monologues, Old Earth. First, on June 9, was something altogether more familiar.

I wasn’t sure, at first, how it would feel to listen to sacred Renaissance works in St. David’s Hall, a modern, secular concert hall. I wasn’t convinced that the beauty of these pieces and the compositional effects, so suited to the vaulted lofts of a cathedral, would carry over when so far removed from their original context.

After fifteen years of trying to persuade us that Byrd’s lesser-known works are just as worth listening to as the famous ones, I felt that the Cardinall’s Musick could have come up with a more exciting programme of his celebration of Easter.

There’s a trend amongst programmers nowadays to provide concerts with a ‘hook’: an extra-musical incentive to pull the punters in, or at least help performers pinpoint their pieces.

Built on the site of a Franciscan friary which was dissolved in 1559, Greyfriars Kirk is one of the treasures of Edinburgh's 'Old Town'. A rich tradition of music-making has grown there, due to its striking interior and fantastic acoustic.

In his introductory talk before The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage concert in Durham Cathedral, conductor Harry Christophers explained that the original idea of their Choral Pilgrimage series was to bring the glories of English church music back into the buildings for which the pieces had been written.

Grigory Sokolov bringt – erfolgreich – Werke des englischen Renaissance-Komponisten William Byrd in die Gegenwart.

Si le pianiste a l’art de concocter des programmes originaux, il se montre aussi curieusement imprévisible, capable de sublimes fulgurances comme d’inexplicables lourdeurs.

The Tallis Scholars begeistern einmal mehr mit einem abwechslungsreichen und doch stimmigen Programm von Josquin des Prezs bis Nico Muhly.

Beim Gedenkkonzert zum 400. Todestag des grossen englischen Komponisten setzten die Sängerin Jessica Jans, die Cembalistin Friederike Chylek und das Cellini Consort Massstäbe.