Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Two of Mendelssohn’s symphonies plus his second piano concerto were almost too much of a good thing, but not when played with such delicacy and spirit

Three nights, three concertos and five symphonies: the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is approaching its deep dive into Mendelssohn with the kind of intensity this still-slightly-underrated composer doesn’t often receive. András Schiff is both conductor and, in the two piano concertos, soloist. The Blüthner fortepiano he’s playing looks like it wants to be a modern concert grand when it grows up. It’s a big instrument for its kind and, in the Piano Concerto No 2 – which began this second concert of the series – its clear, bright tone was a good match for the orchestra. This wasn’t an overly lyrical performance, even though the song-like slow movement flowed beautifully; it was, however, charged with unflagging energy. Schiff picked out the melodies strongly, even while keeping the busy accompanying figuration brilliantly delicate – the finale was a reminder that Mendelssohn, who gave the premiere, was himself quite the virtuoso.

As an encore Schiff played the Variations Sérieuses, a heavyweight solo piano piece lasting well over 10 minutes, probably a meatier item than necessary at this point. Certainly by the time we got to the closing moments of the Reformation Symphony, which followed, the performance had taken on an end-of-evening energy, even though there was another whole symphony to come after the interval.

Bullock/ Tines/Appleby/Los Angeles Master Chorale & PO/Adams
(Nonesuch, two CDs)
The opera met with a mixed response on its 2017 premiere. After two reworkings, and with many of its original cast reprising their roles, this premiere recording is a rich and energetic mix

John Adams’s fourth full-length opera was first performed in San Francisco in 2017. Then the music of Girls of the Golden West played for almost three hours, but after two reworkings – the first for the European premiere in Amsterdam in 2019, the second for the concert performances in Los Angeles last year on which this recording is based – it runs for just over two. Like its predecessors, Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic, Girls of the Golden West is based on real historical events and characters, in this case in the California gold rush of 1849, as chronicled in contemporary documents and journals of the time, from which the director, Peter Sellars , assembled the libretto.

Reviews of the San Francisco premiere had been mixed; the opera’s sheer length and its discursiveness, which blurred the sense of narrative, were both criticised, but Adams’s cuts and revisions seem to have done a great deal to tighten the dramatic focus. The first act presents the socially and racially diverse community, black and white, Asian and Latin American, brought together by the hunt for gold in this fleeting frontier world, while the second shows the tensions that grew up between the miners and their followers, and their tragic results, culminating in the lynching of a Mexican woman who had killed the man who had tried to rape her. Everything is observed by “Dame Shirley”, the pen name of Louise Clappe, a doctor’s wife from Massachusetts who spent 18 months in the California mining camps and brought that world vividly and wittily to life in her letters home.

St George’s Bristol
The German chanteuse enters her seventh decade with her velvet voice and characteristic wit intact

Time Traveler is the title of the indefatigable Ute Lemper ’s current short UK tour and also that of the new album of songs she herself has written. Lemper is mostly labelled a chanteuse, but she has always been multifaceted: singer, actor, dancer – for whom Maurice Béjart choreographed a ballet – an exhibited painter in her native Germany, cabaret artist, and now composer, too.

Seemingly prompted by a “big birthday” – her 60th – last year, a period of musing on life, loves, hopes and glories, was set in train. Songs emerged naturally, reflected particularly in the title song Time Traveler and also At the Reservoir , a favourite place in New York, long since her home. Yet Lemper also pointedly invoked Germany’s history; a potent moment came when listing the iniquities of 1924 Weimar – with whose music Lemper is particularly associated – and the suggestion that, a century on, things are actually still the same. Reaching the final line of Pete Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone? there was real anguish: When will they ever learn? Lemper whispers: “Never!”

After the disruptions of Covid, director David Pickard has managed to balance innovation with tradition in his final year of programming the festival

David Pickard’s nine years in charge of the BBC Proms , one of the most enviable jobs classical music has to offer, have certainly not always gone as smoothly as he might have hoped. If the consequences of Brexit and the difficulties it has created for musicians wanting to perform and tour in Britain were not enough to work around, then the havoc that Covid restrictions inflicted on the 2020 and 2021 seasons made nonsense of many carefully laid plans.

Pickard’s programming has sometimes seemed shaped more by a concern to ensure that every politically correct box was ticked than by determination to come up with a summer season that was as adventurous and attractive as an organisation with BBC’s resources should have no problems in assembling. But first impressions of the new season, his last in charge, suggest that Pickard might finally have got close to achieving a decent balance between all the elements and the different genres that are now expected in a full Proms season.

The 81-year-old conductor makes a rare UK visit with his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, while Yo-Yo Ma, Doctor Who, Florence Welch, Sam Smith and Rule, Britannia! all feature

The BBC today announces details of this summer’s Proms festival of 90 concerts over eight weeks. Daniel Barenboim will be making a rare visit, conducting the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra that he and the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said founded 25 years ago. The 81-year-old conductor has almost completely stepped back from performing because of a neurological condition and has not conducted in the UK since 2019.

Sir Simon Rattle, who at last year’s Proms gave his final UK performance as the London Symphony Orchestra’s music director , will be returning to the Albert Hall with his new orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony. Rattle’s orchestral home before the LSO, the Berlin Philharmonic, will give two concerts with its principal conductor Kirill Petrenko, the group’s only appearance in the UK this year. Also set to be a hot ticket is the 28-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, who comes with the Orchestra de Paris to perform Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

The Venue, Leeds Conservatoire
The song festival – with Arts Council funding reinstated – opened with a meaty all-Schubert programme full of delights and camaraderie

A double anniversary would be cause enough for celebration – 2024 marks Leeds Lieder’s 20th year, and a decade of pianist Joseph Middleton ’s leadership – but the festival has other reasons to be cheerful: the reinstatement of its Arts Council England funding, abruptly withdrawn last year, and the consequent outpouring of generosity from its friends onstage and off, which Middleton’s introductory note credits squarely with keeping the organisation alive to fight another year.

This gala opening recital, a meaty all-Schubert programme of mainstays and rarities, continued in that vein of camaraderie. Bringing Middleton together with pianist Roger Vignoles and baritone Roderick Williams, both Leeds Lieder royalty, as well as soprano Nikola Hillebrand , who made her UK recital debut there in 2022, and the festival’s current cohort of Young Artists, this was truly collaborative music-making: right down to Middleton dutifully turning pages for his fellow accompanist.

The great British conductor was born 100 years ago today. His son Andrew picks his father’s most memorable recordings

As a five-year-old, I sat spellbound on the stairs outside our living room. The furniture had been removed to to make space for a handful of string players, there to rehearse and play with no end in mind other than the pure pleasure of making music. The conductorless string chamber group founded by my father Neville was named “The Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields” (ASMF), after the church in which it rehearsed, and gave its first concert in the Trafalgar Square church on 13 November 1959.

I well remember the excitement when test pressings arrived of recordings by the newly formed group. Theirs was a fresh approach, bringing to works normally performed by the larger and weightier orchestral forces a sparkling clarity and refinement of balance – a style that characterises the Academy’s playing to this day.

Beacon, Bristol
Soloist Alison Balsom delivered Marsalis’s playful new trumpet concerto with poise, expertise and wit – right down to the animal calls

Rather like the American quilts whose fabric embeds a story, Wynton Marsalis ’s new Trumpet Concerto is a patchwork of the history of the instrument and some of its most celebrated exponents, from Louis Armstrong to Frenchman Maurice André. Over six movements, spanning 35 minutes, Marsalis has stitched together myriad styles and characteristics, jumping continents and name-checking composers and players en passant , with a metaphorical doffing of the “Derby hat” mute in tribute.

Conceived for Michael Sachs, principal trumpet of the Cleveland Orchestra, and premiered last year by him, the multifaceted piece has been picked up by English trumpet soloist Alison Balsom. Her performance of it – first with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and now with the London Symphony Orchestra under Antonio Pappano – is testimony to her own virtuoso technique. In the Beacon Hall, Balsom delivered it with cool poise.

Milton Court, London
With music that ranged across four centuries culminating in the premiere of Cassandra Miller’s Chanter for guitar and strings, this concert showcased the skill of Shibe, a truly compelling performer

The Dunedin Consort’s reputation as one of the UK’s classiest ensembles is based on its historically correct performances of baroque and classical works, with a repertoire that rarely strays beyond the end of the 18th century. But a collaboration with the guitarist Sean Shibe has taken the Dunedin well beyond its comfort zone, with a programme that begins in the Renaissance but reaches right into the 21st century, ending with the first performances of Chanter, a specially commissioned work for guitar and strings by Cassandra Miller .

Like much of Miller’s output, Chanter is based on existing music, in this case a Scottish air as played on the smallpipes by Brìghde Chaimbeul . Miller played Chaimbeul’s performance of the air to Shibe, had him repeatedly sing it back to her and recorded the results. From those recordings she made her own transcriptions, which became the basis of the 25-minute work, though the source material hardly appears in recognisable form in the finished concerto. Tiny phrases and occasional cadences occasionally seem to hint at it, but the work unfolds more like a series of gently rocking meditations, lullabies almost, in which neither the guitar nor the string orchestra ever raises its voice.