Performer: Alice Coote

Superb Handelian singing and intense character acting light up Handel’s Semele, staged as a stark, uncompromising indictment of the rich and powerful. 

Michael Tilson Thomas returns to the LSO with more Mahler, this time the mighty Resurrection Symphony which finds the conductor in glowing form. 

Alice Coote imbues every word of Mahler’s deeply affecting song-cycle with expressive intensity. Ryan Wigglesworth and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra struggle to match that achievement in Brahms and Schoenberg.

Sometimes you just wish that circumstances had been different, fate kinder. Michael Tilson Thomas with the London Symphony Orchestra was not in full control of Mahler's mighty Third Symphony.

John Wilson brings the best out of both Holst's music and the players of the RSNO, though Alice Coote fails to hit the heights in Elgar's Sea Pictures. 

One opera conductor gives way to another to play music by one of the greatest of all opera conductors: Mahler's mighty Third Symphony.