Hugh Robertson, the Orchestra’s Editorial Manager and former Limelight Deputy Editor, reveals what he is most looking forward to next year.

Simone Young discusses the highlights of her second “theatrical” year as the SSO’s Chief Conductor, including several works she will conduct for the first time in her celebrated career.

Chief Conductor Jaime Martín discusses the season which includes 17 new works, including three by Composer in Residence Mary Finsterer, while soprano Siobhan Stagg is Artist in Residence.

These recordings are not without poetry – it’s just that there’s not enough of it.

We’ve had “the next Callas”, “the next Sutherland”, “the next Wunderlich”, now, we’re hearing 28-year-old Georgian pianist, Khatia Buniatishvili touted as “the next Argerich”. Not on the strength of this CD, featuring works each of which exists in an orchestral guise (and in which I’d much rather hear all of them)! The Guardian critic unleashed as much bile on Buniatishvili’s Wigmore Hall performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition as his feminist colleagues routinely do on signet ring-wearing, old Etonian Tory politicians who ride to hounds. Broadly, I’m forced to agree: the very opening of this recording is promisingly imaginative, with the Promenade played tentatively – as if the viewer is intimidated by art galleries (though The Promenade connective tissue convincingly becomes bolder as the performance progresses). The Old Castle is hypnotically, but interminably slow. This works, but Bydlo, the ox cart, sounds as though it’s lost a wheel. Other movements – like Baba Yaga (the Hut on Fowl’s Legs) – are dispatched in such a helter-skelter way that they become virtually meaningless. What should be a magical transition between Baba Yaga and the gravity and grandeur of The Great Gate of Kiev is completely botched… Continue reading Get unlimited…

Meet the young pianists, instrumentalists, singers and conductors taking classical music into the future.