It’s been just over a year since we lost Young Dolph, but the late rapper’s estate isn’t letting his memory fade. Along with Paper Route Empire, the world is being blessed with a new album called Paper Route Frank.
Equipped with 13 tracks, including “Old Ways,” the posthumous release boasts features from Key Glock (of course), Gucci Mane, 2 Chainz, Big Moochie Grape, and Snupe Bandz; over production from PRE’s own BandPlay, Drumma Boy, Dun Deal, Sosa 808, and DJ Squeeky.
Love For The Streets (prod. Dun Deal)
Blind Fold (prod. BandPlay)
Woah (prod. Sosa 808)
Uh Huh (prod. BandPlay)
That’s How ft. Key Glock (prod. BandPlay)
Old Ways (prod. BandPlay)
Roster ft. Gucci Mane (prod. BandPlay)
Smoke My Weed (prod. Drumma Boy)
Always (prod. CEOO)
Beep Beep ft. Gucci Mane (prod. DJ Squeeky)
Hall Of Fame (prod. BandPlay)
Infatuated With Drugs ft. Big Moochie Grape & Snupe Bandz (prod. BandPlay)
Get Away (prod. Sosa 808)
Press play and add Paper Route Frank wherever you get music.
The Estate of Young Dolph Releases ‘Paper Route Frank’ Album was last modified: December 16th, 2022 by Shake
Film composer Carter Burwell has opened up about the challenge set him by movie director Martin McDonagh, when working on the music for his multiple award-nominated movie The Banshees of Inisherin.
urwell has worked with such directors as The Coen brothers and Spike Jones — and he composed, orchestrated and conducted the music for the Twilight movie franchise.
Speaking to the Sunday Independent after being nominated for a Golden Globe for his work on Banshees, Burwell said McDonagh gave him one golden rule for the film: no traditional Irish music.
The story involves an Irish fiddler on an Irish island during the Irish Civil War — so Burwell initially could see no reason the music wouldn’t be Irish. But McDonagh made it clear that he hated “diddly-eye” scores.
“Martin didn’t want any Irish music,” Burwell said. “He sincerely hates Hollywood versions of it in film scores, like The Quiet Man. That’s exactly what he didn’t want. He wanted to make it a little more like an allegory or a fable.”
Burwell stumbled upon a solution while reading the Brothers Grimm to his 11-year-old daughter. Unlike the Disney version, the stepmother in the earlier telling encourages her daughters to cut off parts of their feet, in order to fit into the slipper.
Armed with this insight, Burwell began to look at the self-mutilation of Brendan Gleeson’s character as a fairy tale — and that informed the music, playing on Colin Farrell’s character’s loss of innocence.
The approach paid off, and Burwell has been nominated for best musical score at the Golden Globes in January. The movie has also been nominated as best picture, as well as in the categories of director, screenplay, leading actor in a comedy or musical (Colin Farrell), supporting actress (Kerry Condon), and twice for best supporting actor (Brendan Gleeson and Barry Keoghan).
Asked how working with McDonagh compared to the Coen brothers, Burwell said in the recording studio the brothers tended to “sit back and let it all happen”, while Martin was still “throwing ideas out there”. He described him as a “perfectionist”.
The pair met in 2007 when they worked on In Bruges. The collaboration was such a success they agreed to team up every four years. They have since worked on Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards.
Burwell said he understood and accepted that his job as composer involves toying with people’s emotions. “That’s what film music is — it’s very much emotionally manipulative. Manipulating the audience moment by moment,” he said.
Reading a book can be a monotonous exercise at times. To beat the monotony, some people take to play songs in the background. But the discordant tempo of the music may distract the listener making him/her lose focus.
But what if there was suitable ambient music to go with the mood of the para that one isreading? Researchers at International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT-H) have worked on such a thought and developed an algorithm that syncs well with what one is reading in e-book format.
In their demo, the team comprising Makarand Tapaswi, Vinoo Alluri (both faculties) and BTech student Jaidev Shriram took the soundtrack from the Harry Potter movie and aptlyjuxtaposed it with the novel.
Recognition
Their research, pending patent, has won the Brave New Idea Award at the 23rd International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2022) held in Bengaluru early this month.
Vinoo Alluri
Jaidev Shriram
Makarand Tapaswi
In its initial stage, the research is focussed on books that have been adapted for movies. “Harry Potter series was an obvious choice for us as its movie adaptations are big hits,” Shriram said.
The researchers cut the book into parts, with each part reflecting a mood. The soundtrack from the movie too was pruned scene-wise. “We categorised the music based on how homogenous it sounded in terms of emotion,” said Shriram.
While only a part of the book matched with the movie, the researchers filled in gaps with an emotion-based retrieval system. “If a para evokes feelings of anger, gloom or fear, then the algorithm would automatically choose a bit that reflects the mood,” Alluri said.
Elements like these allows the application to play relevant music seamlessly as you scroll down or up the book on your digital device.
She, however, admits that there is a limitation in terms of the length of the music that they could use from the original sound track, factoring in the intellectual property rights.
She, however, says that the use cases can be many. “For one, we can talk to the e-book players who can consider adding another dimension to their subscribers,” she said.
Today’s work in the 5:4 Advent Calendar is a typically leftfield piece by British musician Mica Levi. Levi’s music encompasses the deep and the trivial, the profound and the nonsensical, sometimes simultaneously. Their work BOUND. 9 Minuets, for two small snare drums & ensemble, tends more towards the latter than the former, yet there’s something intriguing and strangely entertaining about its ostensibly empty actions.
But first, the rules, of which there are two sets, one for the pair of snare drummers, one for the ensemble:
That would appear to be that, except that it’s clearly not the full story. Played verbatim, this wouldn’t last very long at all, but judging by its first performance at the 2020 Donauschinger Musiktage, the rules are to be followed repeatedly, giving a duration of just over eight minutes.
Apropos: in the festival’s programme book the piece was listed as having a duration of nine minutes; i can’t help wondering whether the second half of the title, 9 Minuets, is a mischievously misspelled reference to that intended duration, as there’s most definitely no aural sign of any minuets whatsoever or indeed nine of anything else. It’s entirely possible that the snare drummers each perform the phone number nine times, but impossible to tell as they both play pretty much constantly throughout the piece. As for the ensemble, depending on your perspective they do their thing anywhere from 19 to 27 times; the uncertainty arises from the fact that several of the arpeggio bursts (~3:15, ~5:09 and ~7:08) don’t sound isolated but appear to be stopping and restarting multiple times. That perceived sense of a longer, halting continuity is reinforced in the final burst (~7:08) due to the fact that, for no apparent reason, the clarinettist plays the melody for ‘God Save the King’. Regarding the first part of the title, BOUND., this could simply refer to the obvious fact that the players are bound to follow these rules without deviation (except for that rascally clarinet).
So many questions, yet the more time i’ve spent with BOUND. 9 Minuets the more i’ve come to the conclusion that it’s most definitely not a piece remotely intended to provide answers. And in case you’re wondering, i rang the phone number – and it went to voicemail; i left a message, but so far i haven’t heard back…
The world première of BOUND. 9 Minuets was performed by members of the SWR Symphony Orchestra conducted by Titus Engel.
With several YSL members entering into plea deals to avoid jail time in the label’s ongoing RICO case, Young Thug’s lawyer discussed the trial in a recent interview with 11Alive.
The YSL RICO trial—which involves Thug and Gunna, who were indicted on racketeering charges back in May—is scheduled to begin on Jan. 5, 2023.
Thug has been charged with conspiracy to violate the RICO Act and participation in criminal street gang activity, while Gunna—who was detained two days after Thug—faces a charge of conspiring to violate RICO.
In his interview with 11Alive, Thug’s attorney Brian Steel was asked about prosecutors attempt to use the lyrics of Thug and Gunna as evidence to prove they are guilty.
“I don’t believe that unless the lyric has a direct relation to the supposed crime on trial and there’s evidence to support that, the fact that somebody has created words that are in a song or in a book or in a movie, they should not be judged by their work performance because that’s storytelling,” Steel shared.
“So, the problem I really have with the lyrics from rap music throughout our country and right here in Fulton County is we don’t do that with other types of entertainment or artistry. And that’s really my problem because to me, rap music has been birthed by the struggle of the inner city, poverty stricken, oftentimes people of color. Why are we targeting that group rather than a writer who talks about a killing or drug dealing? Or how about the white songwriters?”
When asked why rap, as a genre, always “feels like it’s on trial,” Steel reiterated his earlier points.
“It seems like it’s racist,” he explained. “Because I don’t know why other forms of violent lyrics in country music or in rock-and-roll don’t seem to get this type of attention.”
As for representing Thug, Steel maintained that he’s “had the pleasure of defending Mr. Williams [Young Thug] for approximately a decade.”
“I’m concerned with a human being who’s wrongly charged,” he said. “And I’ve had the pleasure of defending Mr. Williams for approximately a decade, maybe a little more. So to me, I know his family, I’ve defended him in courtrooms multiple times. I knew right away that he’d been targeted for ten years by the prosecution. So, my feeling was exactly what I said, that this is a wrong prosecution and I will defend him.”
You, my reader, are going to pick an album for me to review each month. It is really simple…first, I will give you 5 albums to choose from and second, you will tell me which one of those you would like to see reviewed on the site. See…simple! Now, if you want to cast more than one vote, comment on the Twitter and Facebook post and you could get up to 3 votes on your favorite pick.
There are no longer rules for my selections, maybe themes. I’m just picking albums in my collection and this time they are all from my favorite era of music…The 80’s. We’ve done one with the 80’s rock scene now let’s go to the 80’s Pop scene and what was riding the charts. What are the 5 albums you ask? I have them right here…
U2 – ‘The Joshua Tree’
Prince – ‘Purple Rain’
Genesis – ‘Invisible Touch’
The Cars – ‘Heartbeat City’
Bryan Adams – ‘Reckless’
Let me know which one you would like to see and sometime in January, I will post a review of the album that gets the most votes. You have one week to decide and from there I will start listening to the album and do a review.
The new music video draws footage from Cairo Steps’ latest concert at the Marquee Theatre (Cairo Festival City, November 2022) in which El-Helbawy presented the song in a new musical packaging.
The release comes ahead of the Cairo Steps’ upcoming concerts on 22 and 23 December at the Cairo Opera House, featuring Sheikh Ehab Younis and Ali El-Helbawy.
Released on 8 December, this composition is not the first musical collaboration between El-Helbawy and Cairo Steps’ founder and musical dynamo Basem Darwisch. El-Habawy was featured in the band’s composition titled Elahi, released on their Diwan Cafe album (2021).
Sultan, the new creative composition, fuses music by Darwisch with Mersal El-Habebti, one of El-Helbawy’s best-known songs. The latter was featured in Ahmad Abdalla’s multi-award-winning film Microphone (2010) which brought the singer to the limelight.
Cairo Steps’ Sultan is a new musical offering however, where Mersal changes the key and blends it into new creative phrasings and arrangement.
While Cairo Steps become important protagonists of the song, El-Helbawy’s interpretation that includes segments of recitative and his own improvisations, add important creative color to the whole output. The final result is a signature composition by Darwisch that benefited from a well known song, embellishing it while setting it into new contexts.
Equally, the song’s powerful lyrics, penned by Ashraf Tawfik and expressing one’s love for a woman set at the backdrop of life and cultural realities and expectations, give the whole composition warm and humane weight.
The composition gathers the known set of Cairo Steps’ musicians, with Basem Darwisch on oud accompanied by Rami Attallah (piano), Mulo Francel (saxophone), Evelyn Huber (harp), Rageed William (nay), Mounier Maher (e-bass), Hany Al Sawaf (req), Max Klaas (percussions), Jan Boshra (cello), Reham Mahmoud (viola), alongside violins: Emad Azmy, Radwa Sameh, Shereen Azmy and Nehad Gamaldin.
Cairo Steps has gained international acclaim for its many multicultural layers. The ensemble is a dense carpet, tightly woven with threads representing Coptic culture, Saeedi (or Upper Egyptian) music, Sufi chants, Egyptian and Nubian sounds, jazz, ethnic and classical music. The braided strings speak a single, uniform language, transferring the internalised narrative of their creator to the world beyond the oud.
Since its founding in 2002, Cairo Steps has featured prominent Egyptian musicians, including renowned soloists like Marwa Nagy, Ali El-Helbawy, Monica George, Peter Ghattas, and Sheikh Ehab Younis, among others.
The ensemble has released five albums and multiple singles, including Oud Lounge (2012), followed by Arabiskan (2016), Silk Road (2016), and Flying Carpet (2017), born of a cooperation between Cairo Steps and the German jazz ensemble Quadro Nuevo.
In 2021, Darwisch and Quadro Nuevo were honored with a German Jazz Music Award for his composition Cafe Groppi in the album Mare. The composition was arranged by the renowned Egyptian jazz pianist Rami Atallah and features Darwisch on oud and Rafat Muhammad on percussion. The Cafe Groppi success took place while Darwisch was producing the album Diwan Cafe (2020-2021).
Apart from creating music, Darwisch also has a rich portfolio in artistic management and shares his experience through workshops.
The singer began teasing the follow-up to 2020’s ‘Plastic Hearts’ with a series of posters featuring the strapline ‘NEW YEAR, NEW MILEY’ appearing around Los Angeles. Later, Cyrus updated her Spotify bio to contain the phrase, while the words have also since appeared in her Twitter bio.
Check out one of the posters spotted in L.A. below:
Fans have speculated that Cyrus could be once again working with Mike Will Made It, who produced her 2013 album ‘BANGERZ’. The two of them recently appeared together in a photo posted to Instagram post by Rae Sremmurd with the caption ‘EAR DRUMMERS & HEAD BANGERZ’.
Cyrus released her first live album, ‘Attention: Miley Live’ earlier this year, which featured two unreleased songs, ‘Attention’ and ‘You’ as well as 20 live versions of songs from across her career.
“My fans have been asking me for a live album for a long time & I am so exxxited to give it to them!” Cyrus said in a post announcing the album. “This show was curated BY the fans FOR the fans! I asked my audience what songs they’d like to see me perform at upcoming shows and this is the set list YOU created!”
Cyrus has also been confirmed to have a guest feature on Morrissey‘s upcoming album ‘Bonfire of Teenagers’. The album will be released in the US via Capitol Records in February 2023. A UK release has not yet been scheduled as Morrissey currently does not have a UK record deal.
As a casual musician, I like to record original music in my own little home office/studio for my own personal use, and I enjoy experimenting with different ways to create interesting, sometimes unconventional musical compositions. Artiphon’s Orba 2 makes it easy to do exactly that. I’ve had a lot of fun with the tiny synth, and I can envision tons of ways I’ll be able to incorporate it into my studio, because it’s not just a gimmick.
I spoke to Mike Butera, a musician who holds a Ph.D in Sound Studies, and the founder and CEO of Artiphon, a Nashville-based company that designs smart digital instruments. These are “multisensory instruments anyone can play,” according to the company’s website. Butera tells me he wants to make digital music more embodied and tactile, and more accessible to everyday consumers.
The Orba 2 is one of these multisensory instruments: An ergonomically shaped synthesizer you can hold in the palm of your hand. Artiphon sent me an Orba 2, and when I picked it up and started playing around with it for the first time, I couldn’t put it down for hours. I started out by pairing the device with the Orba 2 app on my phone and experimenting with all the instruments and sounds preloaded into the app. Pretty soon I had a sweet-sounding loop arranged with a droning bass and some killer ambient leads over a simple 4/4 rock beat.
The Orba 2 costs $150 and is available to purchase online directly from Artiphon, through Reverb or at retailers like Guitar Center and Sam Ash. It’s easy to pick up and play right out of the box and requires no musical knowledge to start making some really cool-sounding music. This unassuming little instrument is astonishingly versatile and so simple to use, it can make a musician out of anyone — and can make for a unique little gift.
See at Artiphon
What is the Orba 2?
The Orba 2 is the successor to Artiphon’s original Orba device, which launched in 2019. It’s a compact synth, looper and MIDI controller that’s about the size and shape of your average orange, cut in half. The Orba 2 has essentially the same design and interface as the original — with eight multifunctional pads radiating across the top of the device — but with enhanced functionality throughout.
Perhaps the most notable enhancement with the Orba 2 is that you can record literally any sound in the world onto the app and play it on the device. Strum a chord on your guitar, hum a tune, record the sound of a train whistle, snap your fingers — heck, you can dive into the ocean and record whale sounds to sample on your Orba 2. (But if that’s something you’re actually going to do, please just make sure you use a recording device that’s waterproof).
The Orba 2 also adds an “automatic quantize” function which helps automatically line up your musical creation with the beat when looping music. Automatic quantize is a lifesaver if you don’t have perfect rhythm because you don’t have to worry about being precisely in time — the software takes care of that for you.
It also gives you drastically more looping time than its predecessor. The original Orba only allowed for eight-bar loops (up to 30 seconds of looping), whereas the Orba 2 ups that limit to 128 bars, or up to five minutes of looping time. That gives you plenty of time to create and loop an elaborate, comprehensive musical composition consisting of drums, bass, chords (rhythm) and lead.
The device includes a standard 1/8-inch headphone stereo jack and a USB-C port for charging and connecting to your computer or other device (but you can also connect via Bluetooth). It’s equipped with a 3-watt speaker on the bottom, which is adequate if you’re just casually playing around with it in your living room, but you’ll want to plug your headphones into it to get the full effect.
The Orba 2 is compatible with iOS 11 and later, Android 9 and later, MacOS 10.12 and later, and Microsoft 10 (64-bit) and later.
What can you do with the Orba 2?
For such a simple-looking device, the Orba 2 delivers quite a bit more than what you may expect, with certain limitations.
It’s perhaps best used as a musical sketchpad to help you develop and save your musical ideas. That’s where the Orba 2’s portability and expanded looping functionality really come in handy. You can save your looped songs using the accompanying app and build on them later or just play them back. And it’s small enough that you can have it on your desk or easily tuck it away in your jacket pocket and play it on the bus or in the park — whenever and wherever inspiration hits.
Orba 2’s more than 100 presets run the gamut of musical styles, including anything from traditional synths, bass guitars, piano, violins and acoustic drums to video game sounds, beatboxing, hand drums, vinyl scratches and meditative, ambient sounds. Some presets across modes share the same in-app artwork, meaning that they sound good when played together. One of my favorite presets across modes is called 1981, which can deliver some really nice Stranger Things vibes. Another preset I like is called Ambeeant, which is perfect if you want to create a composition that’s supremely chilled-out and relaxing — like a smooth late-night groove, or something you’d expect to hear in a dimly lit shisha lounge.
Orba 2 chord presets.
Attila Tomaschek/CNET
You can even create your own presets by recording a sound or developing an instrument from scratch using the separate OrbaSynth app, which you can download from Artiphon. Recording a sound is easy using the mobile or desktop apps, but exporting the sound to use on your Orba 2 requires you to connect the Orba to your phone or computer with a USB cable — which isn’t a particularly convenient solution if you’re out and about and want to record something and immediately play it on the Orba. However, you can save your recordings to export later if you record a sound on your phone and you don’t have your Orba or a cable with you.
One of the things I like the most about the Orba 2 is its responsive gesture controls. The pads on top are touch-sensitive and respond nicely to how hard you tap them. You can also hold your finger on a pad to let a note or crash cymbal to ring out, for example. Or radiate your finger inward or outward to add a bit of vibrato or control things like pitch or volume. Other gestures include spin, bump, move, shake and tilt — all of which can help you augment the notes you’re playing and make some really cool sounds.
I also like how Artiphon really does a good job of making the Orba 2 more accessible to nonmusicians by programming the lead presets to play the pentatonic scale. This makes it easy to create lead parts that fit melodically with your song no matter what note you hit.
“The reason we did that is so you could build up a little beat and then take a solo on top, and whatever you press, it’s going to sound good,” Adam McHeffey, Artiphon’s chief marketing officer, told me in an interview. “It’s all about immediacy and just having fun as you play. It’s not about dumbing anything down. It’s just about approachability and just really taking your mind off of it and just having fun.”
If you want to get the most out of the Orba 2, you can use it as a MIDI controller and hook it up to a digital audio workstation like GarageBand, Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Pro Tools and Cubase. I connected my Orba 2 up to GarageBand and that’s where the full potential of this little device really opened up for me in terms of the different kinds of sounds and compositions you can create. I was able to export songs from my Orba 2 into GarageBand, but only as a single track. There doesn’t seem to be a way to export individual tracks. So the best way to leverage GarageBand or any other DAW software with Orba 2 is to start from scratch and create directly within your DAW.
Fun, but not without flaws
Artiphon has a great thing going with the Orba 2, but there are a few inherent drawbacks as well as some room for improvement. For one, while changing octaves is simple and can be done on the Orba 2 itself, there are only eight keys to play with, which makes accessing a broader range of notes considerably less seamless than if you were playing a traditional synthesizer. It’s a necessary but unfortunate tradeoff for the Orba 2’s compact size.
I also found the main Orba 2 app to be rather buggy overall on both mobile and desktop. It crashed often, especially when I was saving songs and trying to load saved songs onto the Orba, which was frustrating. The apps also lost connection with my Orba at random intervals, so I found myself having to reconnect or re-pair it with my phone and MacBook more often than I would have liked. Another thing I found frustrating was that I often couldn’t adjust the volume of individual instruments in my loops, despite the app showing me the option to do so. At times I wished that I could lower the volume a bit on a booming drum beat I created to let the subtler elements of my composition shine — alas, most of the time, the volume wouldn’t budge from 78% no matter what I tried. This put a real damper on my efforts to mix my compositions into something that sounded the way I wanted them to sound. The software has a ton of potential, so hopefully these little quirks get resolved in future updates.
The app’s simple, straightforward navigation and cool visuals are satisfying, but the bugs need to be ironed out.
Attila Tomaschek/CNET
The Orba 2 has added some excellent and useful features that give it a major leg up over the original Orba, but one feature I hope may be available in future firmware updates is the ability to layer multiple different presets from each individual mode on top of one another. For example, it would be helpful to be able to layer multiple different lead presets on top of one another in a single looped composition — say, if you wanted to have a lead guitar part, but also a piano lead or violin lead. That would give you the ability to add some cool dynamics to your songs. Currently, if you already have a lead part looped and you want to change the lead instrument to something else, the originally looped part will change to any other preset you select. Sure, you can work around this by running your Orba 2 through your DAW, but it would be nice to have the functionality through the app as well.
Is the Orba 2 worth it?
Overall, I think the Orba 2 is an excellent little instrument if you’re a casual musician (or even if you have no musical background at all) and just want an easy way to create cool-sounding music at any place or any time. But professional musicians will probably want something with a little more depth and range.
The Orba 2 is unique, and it’s great for experimentation with a virtually unlimited scope of sonic possibilities in the palm of your hand. It’s a worthy addition to your home studio and can help add some impressive dynamics to your music. It’s an awesome tool for coming up with new musical ideas on the fly, wherever you are. And it’s just plain fun. If any of that sounds good to you, then yes, Orba 2 is worth it and you should give it a shot.
1. Orpheus Leeds Grand; October (available to watch online until 30 April 2023) In a year in which opera has come under attack – which could be why it gets plenty of entries here – Opera North’s inspirational union of Monteverdi and Indian classical tradition exceeded all expectations: high musical values and true, joyful local involvement.
2. La Traviata Grand Opera House, Belfast; September An exemplary staging from Northern Ireland Opera, who climbed out of difficult times to produce a dazzling account of Verdi’s masterpiece, as well as reaching out to the wider Belfast community.
3. Music@Malling, Kent Malling Abbey, Kent; April In an ancient Benedictine abbey in the small market town in Kent, Music@Malling’s commission of six new works by a wide range of composers, performed alongside Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos, was an uplifting and rewarding hit.
Chamber Domaine at Malling Abbey in April. Photograph: Tom Bowles
4. Migrations/ The Makropulos Affair Millennium Centre, Cardiff; June/September Welsh National Opera lost its Arts Council England grant in 2022, an exceptional year for the company’s artistic achievements. Their brilliant September production of Janáček’s The Makropulos Affair showed style and authority. In June, WNO musicians and chorus, the Renewal Choir Community Chorus, a Bollywood ensemble and a children’s chorus combined to create the teeming, heart-rending staging of Migrations: six stories and one clever composer, Will Todd.
5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream Theatre Royal Glasgow; February Also excelling in the “flamenco” opera Ainadamar, Scottish Opera struck comic gold in Britten’s version of Shakespeare, big in heart and action, directed by Dominic Hill (artistic director of Glasgow’s Citizens theatre) and conducted by Scottish Opera’s music director, Stuart Stratford.
6. Mahler 8 Royal Albert Hall, London; October So many singers: Philharmonia Chorus, Bournemouth Symphony Chorus City of London Choir, Tiffin Boys’ Choir, Schola Cantorum of the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School, all crammed together with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on the Albert Hall stage under the baton of Vasily Petrenko, to perform Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” – a reminder of the unmatched excitement of concerts on an epic scale.
Elisabeth Leonskaja at Wigmore Hall with the String Quartet of the Staatskapelle Berlin. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer
7. Elisabeth Leonskaja & Staatskapelle Streichquartett Wigmore Hall, London; September The Soviet-Austrian Leonskaja, 77, is one of the greatest living pianists, gleefully showing her skill in Brahms’s chamber music, with virtuosic players roughly half her age hanging on her every note.
8. Peter Grimes Royal Opera House, London; March It was a strong year for Covent Garden – Theodora, Samson et Dalila, Alcina, Aida and a powerful revival of Lohengrin, conducted by newly announced music director Jakub Hrůša, as well as Oliver Leith’s Last Days in the Linbury. But for ensemble talent, Britten’s Peter Grimes triumphed, in Deborah Warner’s staging, starring Allan Clayton, Maria Bengtsson and Bryn Terfel.
Allan Clayton as Peter Grimes with Cruz Fitz (The Boy) in Deborah Warner’s outstanding Royal Opera production. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
9. Salome Usher Hall, Edinburgh; August The Bergen Philharmonic’s concert-opera performances have been a hot festival ticket in recent years. This year was no different: Richard Strauss’s Salome, conducted by Edward Gardner and starring Malin Byström in an incandescent performance that threatened to melt the Usher Hall itself.
10. Bajazet Linbury theatre, London; February Stylish, urgent, bristling with energy, Irish National Opera made as good a case for the operatic works of Vivaldi (and there are plenty…) as you can hope to find.
