Her intimate compositions take existing melodies that she refracts, rethinks and expands into compelling new pieces. Ahead of the premiere of a new work for guitarist Sean Shibe, Cassandra Millers talks about process, pleasures and sleep chanting

4“I steal people’s souls”, says Cassandra Miller. The 47-year old Canadian composer sits in her light-filled living room at the top of a London block of flats, looking tranquil and as unlike a master of the dark arts as it is possible to imagine.

Miller’s intimate and engaging compositions take as their starting point existing melodies, which she variously deconstructs, loops, magnifies and utterly transforms. The act of transcription is an inherently creative process in her hands, and the physicality of a performance – ornaments, notes, pauses, breaths and even sighs – is a vital part of what she transcribes.

Faust/Melnikov/Faust/Symphonieorchester des Bayerische Rundfunks/Hrůša
(Harmonia Mundi)
Violinist Isabelle Faust, violist Boris Faust and pianist Alexander Melnikov honour Britten’s exuberant works with vigour and determination

Isabelle Faust takes a rewarding dive into the violin music of Benjamin Britten , putting the Violin Concerto next to some far less familiar early chamber music. In fact, the work that here gets its recorded premiere – the Two Pieces for violin, viola and piano, for which Faust is joined by her violist brother Boris and the pianist Alexander Melnikov – dates from as early as 1929, when Britten was still a sixth-former. They show a confident, lyrical composer busy digesting his influences, in particular the Second Viennese School.

Unsurprisingly, Britten hadn’t found his distinctive voice at that point, but it was very much there five years later when hebegan the Suite, Op 6 for violin and piano, which includes an engagingly skittish March and an exuberant Waltz, played by Faust and Melnikov with just the right balance of humour and bravura. It’s also there in 1937’s Reveille, a beguiling piece that sounds like an early study for the opera Peter Grimes. The Violin Concerto followed in 1939: here, teamed with the Munich orchestra conducted by Jakub Hrůša , Faust gives a performance that’s impassioned and intense, slightly downplaying its potential for dreaminess in favour of vigour and determination.

Trinity Buoy Wharf, London
Riveting performances underpin a gratifyingly meta version of Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, retold around a Docklands film shoot

The London Handel festival has always offered plenty of opportunities to hear the composer’s music in his own church, St George’s, Hanover Square. But this year, like last, the most interesting event takes audiences somewhere unfamiliar: to Trinity Buoy Wharf this time, an old storehouse on a windswept Docklands bank just across from the O2. As an optional extra you can even travel there by boat, serenaded by an oboe-bassoon quartet. As you prepare to disembark, the conceit of Jack Furness’s production begins to kick in. The charming onboard host turns out to be the assistant director of a film company, here to give us a gentle heads-up about his boss before we sit in on a shoot – for a film of Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo. He’s visionary but volatile, we’re warned. Things may get heated.

And they do, gratifyingly so, thanks to the riveting performances Furness gets from his cast – three singers, plus the actor Durassie Kiangangu as the assistant. The bullying director we’re warned about is Polifemo – a lustful cyclops in the mythical story Handel was retelling – and his victims are his two stars. The drama unfolds around and within the film shoot, in front of us and onscreen, via handheld camera. The film and a translation of the Italian text are projected on to a huge double door which, in a gesture that seems almost magical in context, slides open to let Galatea the sea nymph – or perhaps the singer playing her – walk out into the darkness, the water and the twinkling lights beyond.

Boulez’s 100th and Rattle’s 70th are among the highlights of the LSO’s new season with chief conductor Antonio Pappano in which British music is a strong thread. The orchestra also announced an £8m redevelopment of LSO St Lukes

The London Symphony Orchestra today announced its 2024-25 season , the orchestra’s first under its chief conductor Antonio Pappano. British music will dominate, with a new work by James MacMillan opening the season on 11 September and works by Bax, Elgar, Holst, Walton, Elizabeth Maconchy and Tippett threaded through the following nine months of concerts.

More of the UK’s greatest composers will feature in Conductor Emeritus Sir Simon Rattle’s two 70th birthday concerts in January 2025. Rattle will be joined by LSO Associate Artist Barbara Hannigan for the world premiere of George Benjamin ’s Interludes and Aria from his opera Lessons in Love and Violence, and Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new guitar concerto will be performed by US jazz guitarist John Scofield.

Royal Festival Hall, London
The starry Korean pianist’s account of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto was joyous and compelling, while Gardner made a persuasive case for Tippett’s divisive second symphony

Nearly 30 years after Michael Tippett ’s death aged 93, the composer’s music still divides opinion. Sitting on one side of me during the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s performance of Tippett’s Second Symphony was a man who headbanged appreciatively through the loudest parts. On the other sat a man muttering furiously, who left loudly declaring the performance “a complete waste of time”.

It’s certainly not a symphony on the venerable Beethovenian model. Blocks of material overlap jarringly; the orchestral texture sometimes seems to harbour a rogue agent, as if a musical line has been imported accidentally from another piece; movements end with weird ambivalence. Under the LPO’s principal conductor Edward Gardner , Tippett’s most extravagantly bitonal passages were brash (think multicoloured crazy-paving in sound), the elegiac portions warm and silken. From the incisive chugging of the opening to the finicky busyness elsewhere, Gardner kept this potentially unwieldy score under exquisitely taut control.

From elephant blasts to spiritual jazz, Wynton Marsalis’s concerto is a history of the world in trumpet form. As she prepares to give the UK premiere, Balsom describes the thrill of playing it

When I tell people I’m a trumpet soloist, there are three kinds of response I usually get: “Wow, what a great job!”, “Isn’t that unusual for a woman?” And “That’s jazz, right?”

And it is a great job, the best in the world, if not always the easiest when you consider you have to master hundreds of the tiniest muscles around your mouth, perfectly align your breath control and musical goals, and hold your nerve as you walk out on to the stage to perform with both precision and flair, even on the day you’ve broken your toe or your toddler is sick. Everyone knows if a trumpeter is having an off day (perhaps the tiny lip muscles – the embouchure – are bruised from the day before, or not quite feeling under control or strong enough), and a soloist is only as good as their last concert. But what a thrill it is to do this high wire act for decades.

Jonas Kaufmann, Anna Netrebko and Antonio Pappano pull off a buoyant La Gioconda; elsewhere, a fresh Verdi Requiem and a Byronic septuagenarian viola soloist made this a festival to remember

Riddled with paradox, La Gioconda (1876) was a triumph at its premiere for its Italian composer, Amilcare Ponchielli, but is now seldom staged. The music is hardly known but contains a ballet, the Dance of the Hours, so famous through appropriation and parody that Ponchielli’s name lives on. (Think of hippos en pointe in Walt Disney’s F antasia .) All praise to the Salzburg Easter festival for assembling an illustrious lineup for this four-act grand opera, led by the soprano Anna Netrebko and the tenor Jonas Kaufmann , conducted by Antonio Pappano .

They were joined by the all-Italian forces of the orchestra and chorus of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome, who displayed their affinity with opera – a departure from their usual concert hall activities – with buoyant and unerring skill, both in the pit and on stage. Pappano is Santa Cecilia’s conductor emeritus, after 18 years as music director. (His British successor, Daniel Harding , takes over next season.) The warmth of this established relationship was palpable, both in La Gioconda and in concerts they gave as resident ensemble elsewhere in the festival.

Royal Festival Hall, London
The period instrument orchestra’s late 19th and early 20th-century programme showcased its agility and velvety warmth but more precision – in terms of the instruments used – would be welcome

Having thoroughly colonised the 18th and early 19th centuries, the period-instrument movement is now making inroads into late Romanticism and early modernism. François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles have led the way with their exploration of the turn of the 20th century French repertoire, and here was the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, with conductor Maxim Emelyanychev , applying their historical expertise to Slavonic and Nordic music of the same period.

Where orchestras such as Les Siècles meticulously list the historical provenance of the instruments they use in every concert, the OAE has never offered such information, inviting the suspicion that in their mixed programmes one size might fit all. Here, for instance, it seemed as though the same woodwind and brass instruments were being used for the overture to Glinka’s Overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila, which began the concert, as for Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony which ended it, yet the two works were premiered more than 70 years apart, in a period when the design of woodwind in particular was evolving rapidly, and taking different paths in different parts of Europe. Surely the point of period performance is not just to conjure up a vague aura of authenticity, but to get as close as possible to the sound world a composer imagined for his music, and in the early modern period, that requires much more historical precision.

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment are at The Anvil, Basingstoke , on 5 April.

BBCSSO/Dausgaard
(Onyx)
Bartók revised his ‘pantomime ballet’ many times; the BBC Scottish Symphony orchestra’s new disc is the first ever recording of its final version

First performed in 1917, the one-act “pantomime ballet” The Wooden Prince was the second of Bartók’s three stage works, but it has never achieved anything like the popularity of either Bluebeard’s Castle or The Miraculous Mandarin. With a heavily symbolic fairytale scenario by the author of the Bluebeard libretto, Béla Balázs, it requires the largest orchestra that Bartók ever used: quadruple woodwind and six percussionists. Perhaps that accounts in part for its rarity in the concert hall, even though some conductors, notably Pierre Boulez, programmed it regularly. But the music is curiously uneven. Some of the score seems to look back to earlier Bartók and to the roots of his style, the opening, for instance, inescapably recalls the prelude to Wagner’s Das Rheingold, while elsewhere there are echoes of Strauss and Debussy – and in general it’s not as immediately striking as either Bluebeard or The Miraculous Mandarin, lacking the dramatic concentration of the opera and the lurid vividness of the ballet.

Though it also has some fine, typically Bartókian passages, the composer himself was unhappy with the work when it was first performed, and over the next 12 years continued to rewrite and cut the score. It’s the final revision that Thomas Dausgaard conducts, and extraordinarily this appears to be its first ever recording, about 13 minutes shorter than the original ballet. The performance may not be quite as vivid and detailed as Boulez’s recording of the 1917 score with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra but, as in the other works on the disc – the Divertimento for string orchestra and the six Romanian Folk Dances – the playing of the BBC Scottish Orchestra is very fine in its own right.