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

Emily Howard's new opera, an Aldeburgh Festival commission, takes an ambitiously modernist approach to a dystopian story of loneliness: a tough, but thought-provoking work. 

Soviet Realism rubs shoulders with Romanticism and a new British work in Liverpool.

Petrenko and the RLPO produced a Rachmaninov symphony that ticked all the boxes, a scintillating world première from Emily Howard and a Shostakovich concerto with an impressive replacement soloist.

Manchester favourite Nobuyuki Tsujii made a welcome return to the BBC Philharmonic with Grieg’s popular Piano Concerto, followed by a thrilling performance of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony, conducted by Juanjo Mena. The concert began, though, with a world première. Emily Howard was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 to write her new work, Axon, for the BBC Philharmonic.

When Simon Rattle left the CBSO in 1998 predictions of the orchestra's imminent demise came flooding in from the press. Sakari Oramo, who filled Rattle's shoes, achieved what everyone thought was impossible, further honing the CBSO's sound, using his knowledge and expertise as a violinist to give the strings more polish and precision than they'd previously had.