Guide de la musique classique, de l'opéra et de la danse à Londres

Alexandra Dariescu has made it her mission to create concert programmes that give underrepresented female composers equal billing with their better-known male colleagues. In this kaleidoscopic journey through the wealth of music for piano written across the ages and around the world, she places miniature masterpieces by Missy Mazzoli, Florence Price and Lili Boulanger, among others, alongside those by Bach and Dariescu’s fellow Romanian Ciortea. Dariescu devotes the second half to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite.

The programme explores this journey starting with 10th century Armenian poet Grigor Narekatsi, in a medieval melody transcribed by Robert At’ayan. Rare liturgical chants, female-perspective motets, and traditional polyphonies offer further glimpses into the context and influence of female troubadours. The concert ends with oral tradition polyphonies from Corsica. Idrîsî Ensemble hope to acknowledge the trobairitz not as French subjects, but as distinct artists profoundly rooted in the wider Mediterranean.

In communist Russia, Soviet officials called it an ‘optimistic tragedy’. Shostakovich simply called it his Tenth Symphony. Dark, tense, packed with secret messages and featuring at its centre a terrifying scherzo that might or might not be musical portrait of Stalin himself. Shostakovich’s Tenth is one of the greatest of all 20th-century symphonies, and few living conductors understand it more intimately than RPO Music Director Vasily Petrenko.