En direct, Vidéo: Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | Brandenburg Choral Festival

On peut facilement imaginer que les Vêpres de Rachmaninov sont une oeuvre de Noël. Après tout, "Bogoroditse Devo" figure si souvent dans les programmes de chants de Noël, qu'on l'associe volontiers aux longues soirées d’hiver.

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.

Even at 9.20 on a cold Thursday evening in January, there were queues out the door to hear the Pegasus Choir’s debut at the Brandenburg Choral Festival. As the sixteenth concert of 66, the performance certainly needed something special to attract the crowds. This was achieved by programming Rachmaninov’s magnificent All-Night Vigil – perhaps one of the most famous settings of the Vespers.

This was my second visit to the Brandenburg Choral Festival, and I was looking forward to seeing younger performers tackle some challenging music. The experience outlined in the programme that Oakham School Chamber Choir have had is impressive, with the school giving over 80 concerts a year and touring recently to Dublin and Paris.

After the overload of concerts and carol singing around Christmas, most choirs have a well-deserved break before starting for another year, but not Vivamus. This young London-based choir entered 2013 in style with a candlelit concert for Epiphany. The concert’s main advertised work was Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, with other composers on the programme including Leighton, Howells and Whitacre.

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.

A landmark in Trafalgar Square, St Martin-in-the-Fields was London’s first free-lending library, is home to one of the world’s foremost chamber ensembles (The Academy of St Martin in the Fields), and puts on hundreds of classical music concerts each year.