Our Choices The BBC Music Magazine team’s current favourites

Charlotte Smith Editor

This year’s Proms launch in Soho featured a surprise appearance from members of the Chineke! Orchestra, including founder and artistic director Chi-chi Nwanoku on the double bass.

The group of just five string players performed a stripped-down arrangement of Coleridge-taylor, plus Dvořák, and defied the dry acoustics to have the crowd enthralled. A great opportunity to see these talented performers in an intimate setting.

Jeremy Pound Deputy editor

The arrival of summer inevitably means chatting with friends about where we might go for a long walk or two – if I can get them to go for a route with a musical link, so much the better. I have my eye on a circular jaunt near Salisbury that begins and ends up in Harnham, an area well known to the painter John Constable and the subject of Vaughan Williams’s atmospheric but little known tone poem Harnham Down. Maybe playing them the recording by the BBC Philharmonic under Rumon Gamba will win them over?

Michael Beek Reviews editor

It was great finally to see guitarist Sean Shibe play live recently, on tour with Manchester Collective. I caught them at St George’s Bristol where they played a beautiful and gritty programme featuring new music by Kelly Moran and Emily Hall (see p17)alongside Cage, Eastman and David Lang. Ever the musical adventurer, Shibe used a bow on his electric guitar for Hall’s Potential Space and doubled up as percussionist in Lang’s thrilling Killer.

Steve Wright Content producer

I’ve been realising that I need to let more

Debussy (above) into my life. At the moment, I am captivated by his chamber music, particularly the wonderful Cello Sonata. The middle movement (Sérénade) has some thrilling Spanish sonorities – as the cello is plucked and teased, I find myself sheltering from the midday sun in some sultry Andalusian square. The Finale, meanwhile, is all nervous energy, with that tumbling then rising melody, by turns wistful and joyous.

Alice Pearson Cover CD editor

Dutilleux’s cello concerto Tout un monde lointain

(‘A whole distant world’) is based on poems by fellow Frenchman Charles Baudelaire and beautifully conveys the connection between poetry and music. Dutilleux wrote it for Mstislav Rostropovich and it’s the Russian cellist’s 1974 EMI recording with the Orchestre de Paris that I’d choose above all others.