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5 days ago | bachtrack.com | Rémi Monti

À une quinzaine de kilomètres de Clermont-Ferrand, Riom est une petite ville bâtie au pied de la Chaîne des Puys. Son petit centre historique frappe par son uniformité : ses façades sombres en pierre de Volvic – une roche volcanique – forment un bloc compact. À quelques pas les unes des autres, on découvre la basilique Saint-Amable, la tour de l’Horloge, la Sainte-Chapelle et une série de façades sculptées qui témoignent de la richesse de la ville à la Renaissance.

5 days ago | bachtrack.com | Caitlin Doherty

“You sit in a concert hall, and it’s like an ocean of sound,” Alexey Shor tells me on a scorching April morning in Dubai. But, he adds, “you look at the printed page and it’s not that much information.” It’s an off-hand comment, but one that offers insight into what drew the former mathematical Wunderkind and financial trader to the world of classical music in his forties.

1 week ago | bachtrack.com | Nahoko Gotoh

Another year, another Beethoven quartet cycle at Suntory Hall’s Chamber Music Garden, their annual festival of chamber music held in the intimate space of the Blue Rose hall. Tackling this marathon of performing all of Beethoven’s string quartets over six concerts is the Schumann Quartett from Germany, following the footsteps of the Elias String Quartet (2023) and the Verus Quartet last year.

1 week ago | bachtrack.com | Roy Westbrook

Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa is a rare sighting in this country, even perhaps outside Russia, unless a Russian company tours with it. So a new production from Grange Park Opera is welcome, especially when as successfully staged as David Pountney’s account is here. The Cossack leader Mazeppa is not portrayed in his heroic younger days, as depicted by Byron and Liszt, but is now the ageing Hetman trusted by Tsar Peter the Great, but secretly plotting Ukraine’s independence from Russia.

1 week ago | bachtrack.com | Laura Servidei

Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria is the second of only three surviving operas by Claudio Monteverdi with a nearly complete score, missing just a few choruses and ballets. Composed in 1640 for Venice’s Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo, it was written when Monteverdi was 73 – a very advanced age for the time. This year, the Monteverdi Festival in Cremona presents a new production by director Davide Livermore, who began his musical career as a singer of Monteverdi’s works.