Angela Hewitt, Wigmore Hall review - a match made in heaven

★★★★★ ANGELA HEWITT, WIGMORE HALL Making Bach's English Suites sparkle and dance

Bach’s English Suites sparkle and dance under Hewitt’s graceful touch

This recital finds Angela Hewitt nearing the end of her “Bach Odyssey”, a project to perform all of Bach’s keyboard works, in five cities around the world, between 2016 and 2020. That’s an impressive feat, especially as she performs from memory. Here she presented the English Suites Nos. 4-6, plus an early Sonata, BWV 963.

Prom 71: Dunedin Consort, Butt review – Bach to the drawing-board please

★★★ PROM 71: DUNEDIN CONSORT, BUTT Bach to the drawing-board please

Solo moments were all too brief

Blame it on the box set. The four Bach Orchestral Suites fit neatly together as a recording project. They used to fill out the four sides of a double LP back in the early stages of the baroque revival. Completists and collectors could rejoice then, and with many more versions to choose from, they still can now.

Edinburgh International Festival 2019: Bach's Multiple Concertos/ Manon Lescaut reviews - dancing harpsichords, perfect Puccini

EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL 2019: BACH'S MULTIPLE CONCERTOS / MANON LESCAUT Dancing harpsichords, perfect Puccini

A day of pleasure and pain crowned by Sondra Radvanovsky and Donald Runnicles

Puccini's and Abbé Prévost's glitter-seduced Manon Lescaut might have been inclined to linger longer in the salon of dirty old man Geronte if he'd served her up not his own madrigals but Bach's music for various harpsichords and ensemble.

theartsdesk in Bergen: Gothic shocks and Romantic treats

THEARTSDESK IN BERGEN Tradition and modernity at Norway's premier arts festival

Genres and periods mix and match in style at Norway's premier arts festival

Ole Bull sounds like some legendary gun-slinging hero of the Wild West. A legend he definitely was, and he spent long enough in the US to found a migrant community in Pennsylvania. But the Norwegian virtuoso (1810-1880) made his name not with a rifle but a fiddle. Back in Bergen, his birthplace, Norway’s first global superstar bought an entire island, Lysøen. He commissioned a fantasy mansion there from the architect Conrad von der Lippe.

theartsdesk in Gothenburg: concert-hall storytelling rivets at the Point Music Festival

Galvanizing Santtu-Matias Rouvali kicks off, and two dozen instrumentalists go barefoot

There was a special celebratory aura to the start of Swedish city Gothenburg's first Point Festival. Earlier in the week its Symphony Orchestra's Chief Conductor, electrifying Finn Santtu-Matias Rouvali, had not only announced a renewed contract there but also been appointed to the same position with our own Philharmonia Orchestra, to succeed Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Igor Levit, Wigmore Hall review – full-spectrum Bach from a prodigious talent

★★★★★ IGOR LEVIT, WIGMORE HALL Full-spectrum Bach from a prodigious talent

The Russian-born Berliner delivers gripping pianistic theatre

You seldom hear a Champions League-level roar of approval at the Wigmore Hall. Last night, though, Igor Levit drew a throaty collective bark of appreciation from the audience after (for once) an awed hush had followed the final dying cadences of the aria’s return in Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Had he earned it? Absolutely. This recital was first of three devoted to the idea of Variations. Friday will see Levit play Beethoven’s Diabelli set, and Frederic Rzewski’s mighty deconstruction of the revolutionary anthem “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”.

Mitten wir im Leben sind, De Keersmaeker, Queyras, Rosas, Sadler's Wells review - Bach-worthy genius

Outwardly austere, inwardly vibrant life-and-death journey through the six Cello Suites

All Bach is dance, a teacher once told me. The justifiable exaggeration switched on a light; leaping to the Brandenburg Concertos followed. This great work of kinetic art is of a different order. Choreographer and performer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker represents the pure but vibrant mastery of the Cello Suites in the way that the soul moves with them, responsive to every hyper-dance form, key and modulation.