Music + Live music reviews
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Finnish violin star Pekka Kuusisto held the audience rapt with his range of playing styles, on the opening day of the Southbank’s Nordic music festival
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Phelim McDermott’s new production for ENO features some virtuoso turns and preserves the tragedy’s air of mystery, but at times lacks cohesion
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Three boy singers added a new perspective to Mahler’s Fourth, in a programme that also featured two marvellously refined Sibelius miniatures
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Playing to a crowd of out-of-towners, Justin Vernon’s stripped-back band mixes martial Aphex Twin electronics with their traditional melancholy
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The bandleader and a powerful orchestra celebrated five decades of innovation in this freeflowing evening
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From heartbreaking beauty to barely contained chaos, the band deliver a surprisingly uplifting arena gig
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Sally Beamish and David Harsent have created a timeless if detached drama that was unfussily staged and finely played by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
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The anti-Freudian Oedipus opera may not flawless, but this performance with the LPO was a superb and beautiful achievement
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Welsh National Opera mark the centenary of the 1917 revolutions in this chilling, brilliantly designed production of Mussorgsky’s complex opera
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Six years after their ‘farewell’ show, James Murphy’s dance-punk magpies have returned, bigger and bolder than ever
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A gun-toting woman craves revenge in a gloriously tense European double-header in Hackney. Meanwhile Simon Rattle’s on a roll…
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As new album Sleep Well Beast becomes their biggest hit, the Ohio angst-rockers unleash the full force of their brooding songs, with vocalist Matt Berninger on particularly lung-busting form
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Simon Rattle’s Faust was seamless and vivid, with astonishing precision from the LSO’s Chorus; Adès’s selection for Guildhall students was rather piecemeal
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Dave Grohl and co treat the O2 Arena like a Seattle dive bar during a three-hour set of fervent grunge and garage-punk – with a guest appearance by Rick Astley
BBCSO/Vedernikov review – A rare outing for Bruch's truculent double piano concerto