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Longborough Festival Opera’s new production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser is impressive vocally but particularly distinguished by Anthony Negus’s intelligent and vital conducting.

At the age of 88, pianist Paul Badura-Skoda continues to explore the central Viennese repertoire at Vienna's Musikverein through a distinctive and idiosyncratic approach. 

The Vienna State Opera’s revival if their 2014 production of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen with conductor Tomáš Netopil vividly realises the glowing colours of the composer's great affirmation of the eternal vigour of nature.

Daniel Martyn Lewis embarks on an exploration of Bach’s forty-eight Preludes and Fugues at Hay Festival, bringing both rigour and an idiosyncratic individuality to his approach.

Philip Glass finds a new simplicity in an impressive première production of The Trial from Music Theatre Wales. 

A great post-war classic by Henze in a strong new production from Welsh National Opera. 

Benjamin Britten was very precise about what constituted the official canon of his works, but, in addition to his stipulated 95 opus numbers, he composed a huge amount of occasional music.

In the last of a four-part series, Peter Reynolds looks at different strands in contemporary music with a focus on composers in the immediate here and now. This week he looks at five composers whose approach to music is utterly individual.

In the third of a four-part series, Peter Reynolds looks at different strands in contemporary music with a focus on composers in the immediate here and now. This week he looks at five composers whose music occupies the challenging end of the spectrum.

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

In the second of a four-part series, Peter Reynolds looks at different strands in contemporary music with a focus on composers in the immediate here and now. This week he writes about five composers who have, in different ways, attracted the label “minimalist”.

Whole concerts devoted to the music of one composer can be risky affairs: a cruel test of how mature and robust a composer is. In a concert devoted to the music of the South African composer Robert Fokkens, given by the Fidelio Trio and opening Cardiff University’s 2013/14 series, both composer and performers came through with flying colours.

In the first of a four-part series, Peter Reynolds looks at different strands in contemporary music with a focus on composers in the immediate here and now. This week he writes about five composers now in their 30s and 40s, all writing very different kinds of music.

To those who grew up with Michael Tippett’s music and lived through the later premières, the neglect into which he has fallen and the ill-disguised contempt of many is both puzzling and distressing. The same fate befell both Sibelius and Vaughan Williams in the years following their deaths and now, fifteen years on, there is perhaps just a faint glimmer of a Tippett reappraisal on the horizon.

The classification of composers into those who write tonal music and those who inhabit the harder-edged shores of serialism and atonality raised its head once again at the first of the three concerts given by the Festival Chamber Orchestra at this year’s Presteigne Festival.

It could be argued that the success of contemporary music at the Presteigne Festival is due to its promotion of composers who draw on traditional forms and tonal harmony. Perhaps, but the world of contemporary music has moved on from what some nostalgically describe as the heroic avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s.

The Presteigne Festival has carved out a niche amongst Welsh Festivals (or, indeed, British festivals as a whole) for its largely contemporary programme of work.

An allegiance to Welsh performers and composers is a major feature of this year’s tour by the National Youth Orchestra of Wales, with two native contemporary scores on the programme performed by a Welsh soloist and conductor. It could easily become cosy and parochial, but the results were amongst the NYOW’s finest achievements in recent years.

Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale is a curious piece. Written in the dying days of World War One, in 1918, whilst Stravinsky was in exile in Switzerland, it was initially planned to alleviate his precarious financial situation.