Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff
The gala celebration featured flamboyant Ravel, an elegant new work from Huw Watkins and deeply expressive Strauss

In the decade since its inception, co-directors violinist David Adams and cellist Alice Neary have nurtured their Penarth Chamber music festival from its small beginnings to a jam-packed, ambitiously programmed five-day event. With a remarkable array of top instrumentalists, singers and contributors, this year’s 10th anniversary lineup showed just what a classy affair it’s become. What makes it special is the sense of connection and trust that’s developed between players and audience, allowing George Crumb’s extraordinary Black Angels quartet to be as enthusiastically received as Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge which preceded it.

For their gala celebration, the festival decamped from its base at the Pavilion on Penarth’s seashore to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, where many of the players also teach. Lucy Wakeford was the harpist in Ravel’s septet, Introduction and Allegro, where quiet intimacy is balanced with the almost flamboyant virtuosity which was the work’s raison d’être, part of what was essentially a campaign to promote the new double action pedal harp by the makers Érard. Advertising was never more honourably conceived nor cast such a spell.

Garsington Opera, Wormsley Estate, Stokenchurch
While it might have been cancelled after the premiere in 1840, Christopher Alden’s frenetic staging, an effervescent Philharmonia Orchestra and a fine cast show there’s a decent evening’s entertainment in there

Verdi’s spirited Un Giorno di Regno – usually translated as King for a Day – is one of his least performed works. So badly received was the La Scala premiere in 1840 they cancelled the rest of the run. The composer later went to considerable lengths to excuse it as the misbegotten product of a period of personal tragedy. It would be more than 50 years before he wrote Falstaff, his only other comedy.

So why revive it now? Well, as Christopher Alden’s frenetic, over-egged soufflé of a staging for Garsington Opera demonstrates, there’s a decent evening’s entertainment in there just itching to be liberated. And as Chris Hopkins’ buoyant reading of the score proves, Verdi came up with plenty of first rate, second rate music (to misquote Richard Strauss), even if you don’t come out whistling many of the tunes.

From cinema programmers to orchestra CEOs, figures across the arts world reveal what 14 years of Tory rule has done to the sector – and whether a change of government would improve anything

The October 2023 statement from Leeds music and clubbing venue Sheaf St did not mince its words. “Sadly, the world is not on our side right now,” it said, before shutting its doors for the last time. “Our industry is facing a real crisis, post-pandemic, with low attendance, rising costs, increasing fees, significantly reduced spend, and skyrocketing utilities and stock costs. The business is no longer sustainable and cannot recover.” Sheaf St had established itself at the heart of a creative community. It combined high-profile dance acts (Nicky Siano, DJ Yoda, Crazy P and many more) with a generous approach to engagement that included open-deck sessions and yoga classes. Sadly, this wasn’t enough.

Across the country, similar stories abound. These tales of decline, struggle and eventual defeat encompass every artistic discipline, at every level. They include nightclubs and classical orchestras, comedy venues and theatres, independent cinemas and grassroots music venues. There are threats to public service broadcasting and a sense of almost complete abandonment of arts provision in state schools. The arts pyramid is in danger of collapse. This crisis represents a tangible threat to a huge national income generator (£108bn in 2021) and a primary source of UK soft power. But of course, it’s much more than that.

The Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, Tower of London
Premiering Roderick Williams’ song cycle about Black Tudors alongside songs from the period itself, the rising-star soprano was elegant, while the uber-lutenist poured her solos like liquid

Deep inside the Tower of London, the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula was built for the people who lived and worked in the fortress during Henry VIII’s reign. Thomas More is buried there; so is Anne Boleyn. It’s a coolly atmospheric place. For the opening concert of this year’s Spitalfield’s music festival, it was more than a venue: the Tower’s many “ghosts” inspired the programme performed by rising-star soprano Nardus Williams and uber-lutenist Elizabeth Kenny.

There were three short pieces attributed to Henry VIII and songs with texts by Robert Devereux, who became one of the Tower’s many prisoners. Courtly grace crossed such political divides: seated next to Kenny, Williams’s vocal lines were elegantly shaped but unshowy, her ornamentation featherweight, her diction crystalline. Kenny’s brief solo turns poured like liquid, musical lines barely troubled by the percussive quality of plucking.

Claimants, backed by composer’s estate, lose claim of co-authorship, described as ‘historical fiction’

A French court has ruled that Boléro, one of the best-known works of classical music in the world, was written by Maurice Ravel alone, in a verdict on a case with big financial stakes that could have taken the work out of the public domain.

Ravel first performed Boléro at the Paris Opera in 1928 and it was an immediate sensation. He died 10 years later and his heirs were paid millions of dollars until the copyright ran out in 2016.

Purcell Room, London
Ben Goldscheider’s solo horn took centre stage in a rewarding and fascinating concert featuring new and older compositions that combined his instrument with live electronics

We’ve come a long way from the early days of electroacoustic music, when a ring-modulated piano or a flute or a violin dialoguing with electronic echoes of itself was often the height of technological sophistication. Even so, it still seems strange to find a solo horn as the focus of a concert featuring real-time electronics. But Ben Goldscheider spent his time during lockdown in 2020 looking into the possibilities of combining his instrument with live electronics, and he presented the results of his research in a recital with the “media artist” Philip Dawson, which featured the premieres of three specially commissioned works.

Goldscheider also included the work that had started him on his explorations, the 1979 Fantasie for horns by the German-born Canadian Hildegard Westerkamp, in which the solo horn has a taped accompaniment assembled from the sounds of many different horns, including fog, car and alp. The writing for the live instrument is entirely conventional, the tape background mostly continuum-like, until shortly before the end the horn embarks on a solo that seems to come straight out of a 19th-century German opera. Thea Musgrave’s Golden Echo III was Goldscheider’s multi-channel recreation of a piece originally composed in the 1980s for solo horn and 16 other horns on tape, which places the audience at the centre of a surround-sound celebration of brass sonorities.

Royal Opera House, London
The men prance about in fake moustaches while the women roll their eyes in this turbo-charged revival of Jan Philipp Gloger’s riotous take on Mozart’s opera

‘Is that the one with the mobile phones?” someone asked me ahead of the latest revival of Jan Philipp Gloger’s 2016 production of Così fan Tutte. That’s the one, but those phones are just one cameo in a staging that rampages around time and place with riotous energy and accessories galore. Although Da Ponte’s libretto about male naivety and female faithlessness theoretically unfolds in a single 24-hour period, the Aristotelian unities don’t trouble us here.

Act One alone hurtles from a 21st-century night at the Royal Opera (still clutching their red programme books, the opera’s two couples have just watched … Mozart’s Così fan Tutte) to a farewell scene at a Brief Encounter-ish station, to a bar populated by a kind of Rat Pack of aggressively flirtatious men wearing thin black ties and porkpie hats, to a Technicolor Eden where the now-disguised Ferrando and Guglielmo pretend to poison themselves under an apple tree sporting a prominent serpent.