En direct, Vidéo: Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | City of London Festival

The LSO, led by Edward Gardner, delivered a moving and profound performance of Haydn's Creation despite the acoustic challenges of St Paul's. 

After quartets by Nielsen and Beethoven, Nordic folk song arrangements brought the first day of the 2015 City of London Festival to a festive close.

Two strange bedfellows – Penderecki and Bruckner – brought together in the acoustically awkward, if architecturally spectacular surrounding of St Pauls Cathedral by Daniel Harding and the LSO as part of the City of London Festival.

The City of London Festival this year is ambitiously programmed, with a number of common themes running through the events.

As part of the City of London Festival 2013, the Nash Ensemble delivered a varied mixture of works loosely connected by the ubiquitous Britten theme. This hotchpotch-style approach has worked very well indeed for the Nash for nearly 50 years, and tonight’s concert was no exception.

There is something haunting in waiting till ten o’clock at night in the cemetery of one of London’s oldest churches. Even when surrounded by other audience members, this is not a place one would normally seek out on a nice summer’s evening.

The newly built and unconventionally imposing Coventry Cathedral, built next to the ruins of the original medieval building destroyed in the Second World War, played host to the first performance of Britten’s War Requiem in 1962.

In 1993, by some strange musical alchemy, a creative partnership was born that has gone on to bear some remarkable fruit. On Officium, stylish jazz and classical label ECM brought together The Hilliard Ensemble – a vocal quartet known for the precision with which it had tackled and animated austere soundworlds from Perotin to Pärt – and Norwegian jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek.

For me, the chamber music concerts at the various City Livery Halls have always been the highlight of the City of London Festival.

To sit directly under the splendid chiaroscuro dome of St Paul's Cathedral, with angels, apostles and Christ himself glittering down from mosaiced arches, is to be in the middle of astonishing beauty.

This was the showpiece concert of this year’s City of London Festival and took place in the spectacular surroundings of St Paul’s Cathedral. Three key French composers were featured, concluding with well-known 3rd Symphony of Saint-Saëns. The first performance of this work was conducted by Saint-Saëns in London in 1886 in the long-since demolished St James’s Hall.

With their appetite for musical diversity and youthful enthusiasm, the six-year-old Aurora Orchestra and their principal conductor, Nicholas Collon, have grand ambitions. With ‘When Doves Cry’ they did not disappoint, showing both their exceptional aptitude for showcasing contemporary music and a promising ability to inject freshness into seminal classical works.

Each piece in Nicolas Alstaedt and José Gallardo's programme was re-imagined for the cello as a direct response to existing musical material. The original music either came from a different genre, or was composed for a different instrument. Four significant works in the cello repertoire emerged.