2021 live music guide
LIVE MUSIC GUIDE 2021
Our guide to the concerts and opera across the world making a welcome return throughout next year
Introducing a season packed with performances we thought we’d never see, and a good deal more
Concert venues and organisations around the world are currently planning to bring cheer with performances and festivals we missed during last year’s pandemic. So here’s to 2021 and an exciting revival of music!
Gabrieli Consort and Players
Live stream/on demand,
25 December – 6 Jan
Web: www.gabrieli.com
Paul Mccreesh presents a crack team of singers including Carolyn Sampson and Roderick Williams for all six of Bach’s festive cantatas that constitute the Christmas Oratorio. Each will be streamed live on the appropriate day starting with Christmas Day itself, and each concert includes carols, chorales and bonus helpings of Bach.
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
Venue tbc, Birmingham, 17 Jan Tel: +44 (0)121 616 2616 Web: www.bcmg.org.uk
The CBSO’S contemporary music ensemble premieres its latest ‘Sound Investment’ commission: Christian Mason’s The Singing Tree, an exploration of the relationship between humans, nature and the divine. Accompanying it is Helmut Lachenmann’s Concertini.
Nash Ensemble
LSO St Luke’s, London, 22 Jan Tel: +44 (0)20 7638 8891 Web: www.lso.co.uk
Composer-violist Brett Dean and soprano Christine Rice join the Nash for the second of four Radio 3 lunchtime concerts exploring ‘Elgar Plus’. Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and Schumann’s dreamy Fairy Tales, Op. 132 join Elgar’s Sospiri and the rarely heard Concert Allegro for solo piano.
London Unwrapped
Kings Place, London, 22 Jan Tel: +44 (0)20 75201490 Web: www.kingsplace.co.uk
Kings Place’s year-long ‘Unwrapped’ series has become a capital fixture. So its appropriate that this year London itself inspires a journey through the music of courts and cathedrals, ale houses and clubs; and with an eye both to locals such as Purcell and visitors like Haydn and immigrant game-changers. Artist-in-residence Iestyn Davies sets the ball rolling, exploring the repertoire for ‘Handel’s London Altos’.
Opera North
The Lowry, Salford Quays, 23 Jan Tel: +44 (0)113 243 9999 Web: operanorth.co.uk
Opera North has postponed its concert performances of Parsifal this spring but is working on a smaller-scale Wagnerian project to be conducted by
Richard Farnes. For now, a ‘whistle-stop Cinderella’ invites three singers and an accordion to a ball (spread across halfa-dozen venues) whose dance card is marked by Rossini, Massenet, Viardot and Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Sound Festival
Aberdeen and around, 28-31 Jan Tel: +44 (0)1330 826526 Web: www.sound-scotland.co.uk
North-east Scotland’s winter festival of contemporary music is split over two weekends, and this second instalment is again a hybrid of live and digital. Philip Cashian’s new work for horn consolidates a festival focus on that instrument, and there’s a new piece by Rylan Gleave.
Llŷr Williams
Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff, 28 Jan
Tel: +44 (0)29 2039 1391
Web: www.rwcmd.ac.uk
Last September, 24 new Steinway pianos were delivered to Cardiff, making the college Europe’s first Steinway Exclusive conservatoire. A current Steinway International series includes Pavel Kolesnikov and Ingrid Fliter; first, Ll r Williams inaugurates his new six-concert Chopin series with a streamed recital.
London Sinfonietta
Streamed from 3 Feb Web: www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk
The Sinfonietta hopes to be back live at London’s Southbank Centre in May – and the Autumn 2020 season (including a 70th-birthday concert for James Dillon) is currently available on its own digital channel where, from 3 February, there’s the world premiere of Luke Bedford’s In the Voices of the Living, a setting of diverse texts sung by tenor Mark Padmore.
Ensemble 10/10
St George’s Hall, Liverpool, 4 Feb Tel: +44 (0)151 709 3789 Web: www.liverpoolphil.com
Dividing itself between orchestral concerts of Schumann, Shostakovich and Schwertsik, and more intimate chamber recitals, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic is adapting to the times