| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 18-Apr-2013 Queen's Hall, Edinburgh | Scottish Chamber Orchestra celebrate Britten with Purcell |
 Endeavouring to travel lightly through the world, I tend not to collect programme notes. However, such was the quality of Jo Kirkbride’s notes for this SCO Britten centenary celebration that scanning them for e-posterity is tempting. They prompted a consideration of the whole idea of programming. A structured evening’s listening is an entirely different thing from an evening’s will-o’-the-wisp home listening, and it can be greatly enhanced by coherent notes from a single source.
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| 23-Mar-2013 St Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church | Lamentations: The Orpheus Chamber Singers perform music for Holy Week in Dallas |
 “Please silence all electronic devices and refrain from talking. This evening’s program will be presented without intermission or breaks for applause. It is our hope that this structure will assist in providing a meaningful experience...” If I were to say, in 2013, that I had an unusual concert experience, you might assume the performance took place somewhere edgy or casual (a trend defined by (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York), featuring musicians in street clothes playing amplified household objects or something similarly avant-garde.Read full review... | |
| 1-Mar-2013 Musikverein: Großer Saal | Cornelius Meister's Sibelius at the Vienna Musikverein doesn't quite take flight |
 Jean Sibelius is purported to have written part of his Symphony no. 5 after having witnessed a large flock of swans take flight from his home in rural Finland. Whether this story is apocryphal or not, the “swan theme” has become part of the Western musical subconscious, with quotations showing up in jazz and pop music for much of the last century. In this performance, Cornelius Meister, conducting the ORF RSO, made individual moments in this work sing, without really giving a good sense of its overall shape.
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| 23-Feb-2013 Kirche St Georg | Ensemble Vocalisa Variable perform works for female voices in Denzlingen |
| The Ensemble Vocalisa Variabile presented a varied programme in the Kirche St Georg, Denzlingen, featuring eight different composers whose period of activity spanned no less than six centuries. In addition to a number of fine musical high-points, it was this versatility which proved to be one of the most impressive aspects of the performance.
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