Balance and depth take center stage as the Festival of New Trumpet Music begins in Brooklyn

Seven Storey Mountain, the title of Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s autobiography, is a reference to the mountain of purgatory in Dante’s Inferno. It is also, fittingly, the title of trumpeter Nate Wooley’s song cycle – meant to represent “a certain abandon found in religious practice within the confines of a composed work for instrumentalists”.

Now they know how many cacti it takes to fill the Albert Hall. Last night’s marathon John Cage Prom finished up, over three hours after it had started, with a wonderfully cactus-heavy performance of Branches (1976).

The Academy of Ancient Music poses the question what might have been in Leipzig with stunning performances of Bach and his competitors to be the new Thomaskantor. 

Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder provide an apt, if somewhat unexpected, partner to Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall. 

Leonard Slatkin returns to the Prague Symphony Orchestra with one of his own pieces, a Schubert tribute that steals the show.