Alice Boyd (soundscapes, synthesizers, vocals), Belle Chen (piano, synthesizers), Lucinda Chua (cello, vocals), Erland Cooper (electronics, piano, presenter, tape machines), Katherine Tinker (piano, synthesizers), Isobel Waller-Bridge (piano), BBC Symphony Chorus, City of London Sinfonia / Alexandra Wood (violin)
Royal Albert Hall, London Thursday 20 August 2026
Reviewed by Ben Hogwood Photos (c) BBC /
The role of classical music in modern society is changing. With the need to ‘unwind’ greater than ever before, thanks to an age of conflict, hardship and technology – constant visual and audio bombardment from our devices, among many other things – there is a space where calm and undemanding music can make its understated mark.
This can of course happen in operas and substantial Prom concerts, but that Radio 3 should introduce Unwind, their digital counterpart to the main station, says a lot about the mental health of our generation and our short attention span, constantly fraying at the edges as we deal with anxieties, the media and too much attention to social media (I’m speaking for myself here!)
Ultimate Calm is a programme residing on the new channel, beginning on Radio 3 itself under the guidance of the well-qualified Olafur Arnalds before finding its new spiritual home. So how do the BBC Proms achieve ultimate calm, and is it better in person or experienced at home?
The first sounds on arriving in the arena at the Royal Albert Hall were those of blackbirds, surely the idea of Orcadian composer and multi-instrumentalist Erland Cooper – who, as a regular Unwind contributor, curated this Prom. The music was in the most part enhanced by the birdsong and other field recordings, reminding us of the importance and appreciation of natural beauty.
The published programme proved helpful to a point, listing the pieces but not in the order they were performed. Cooper’s music secured a sonorous and comforting start, his Music for Growing Flowers (Nocturne) presented in a new arrangement blossoming like its subject. The yearning tones of the BBC Symphony Chorus were supplemented by cleverly wrought percussion with the hands imitating rain and wind and complemented by the soft bed of City of London Sinfonia strings.
This curtain raiser / light dimmer was the first work of what became a streaming playlist in live form, with little between the tracks save for field recordings, allowing the listener to picture a natural space. The musical language was largely simple – not a criticism – as it allowed the mind to wander, and – ultimately – to unwind.
Pianist Belle Chen chose well with her pieces, two excerpts from the excellent Ravel In The Forest album that included evocative forest noises from a synthesizer positioned on top of the piano. Moonrise, the first excerpt, leant on Barber’s Adagio for Strings for its inspiration and proved effective in this context.
Lucinda Chua’s cello (above) then explored rich, multitracked sonorities on I Left the Earth, while a vocal number, Something Other Than Years, provided a musical affirmation with its catchphrase, “show me how to live this life”. At this point, even allowing for the plaintive Symbiosis from Alice Boyd (below) and the deep resonance of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s A Pile of Dust, we were walking a fine line between background and foreground music, the audience a mixture of calm and fidgeting, as though in the half hour before sleep. Oddly, the unwinding music also drew vivid parallels with coffee shop culture rather than the Royal Albert Hall.
Standing out in the foreground was the craftsmanship of Finzi, Sibelius and Debussy. Finzi’s gorgeous Romance stole the show in a passionate performance from the string orchestra, who also captured the warmth of Sibelius’s Andante Festivo along with its elusive emotions. Meanwhile a sensitive arrangement by Erland Cooper of Debussy’s Clair de Lune also hit the spot, with a special solo from cellist Will Schofield. The City of London Sinfonia strings played dreamily under the direction of Alexandra Wood, the 55-year-old ensemble infrequent Proms visitors but extremely welcome here. The BBC Symphony Chorus, used more sparingly, contributed a brief but moving Abendlied from Josef Rheinberger.
The principal problem with experiencing such a Prom in the flesh was the approach of the midnight hour, and with it the anxiety that the last form of transport home was imminent, making it impossible to unwind completely. With this in mind your correspondent took his leave just as a world premiere was beginning, a new arrangement of Isobel Waller-Bridge’s Solitudes (after Satie) for two pianos, wordless choir and string orchestra. Listening back on BBC Sounds, it proved an affecting piece whose ripples spread out far beyond the hall with waves of wordless singing from the chorus.
As an advert for Radio 3 Unwind, this concert was a strong promotion and will hopefully propel the right audience to its channel. As a way into classical music it is persuasive and low maintenance, especially with the natural link. Yet it is to be hoped such an audience can blossom in the way of Erland Cooper’s flowers, encouraged to explore more substantial works by the composers whose relaxing sounds they have heard. Debussy, Ravel and Sibelius in particular have all written music with great kinetic energy! Yet that is for another day…for this Prom, sensitively staged if somewhat out of place for the live visitor, will leave a lasting legacy online.
Repertoire: Cooper Music for Growing Flowers (Nocturne) Belle Chen Ravel In The Forest: Moonrise; Three Birds Finzi Romance for string orchestra Lucinda Chua I Left the Earth; Something Other Than Years Jóhannsson A Pile of Dust Sibelius Andante festive Rheinberger Abendlied Alice Boyd Symbiosis Debussy arr Cooper Clair de Lune (Suite bergamasque) Isobel Waller-Bridge Solitudes (after Satie)
In the first of two interviews themed around the Aldeburgh Festival, Featured Artist Ryan Wigglesworth talks to Ben Hogwood about the influence of his mentor, Oliver Knussen, and the inspiration he takes from the music of Britten, Debussy and Bruckner.
Picture credits: Benjamin Ealovega (Ryan Wigglesworth, Steven Osborne), Mark Allan (Oliver Knussen), Sussie Ahlberg (Sophie Bevan), Lawrence Power (Giorgia Bertazzi)
Ryan Wigglesworth is a musician of many disciplines – and for half an hour he has joined us to talk about his work as a composer, conductor and pianist, specifically within the rarefied world of the Aldeburgh Festival, where he is a Featured Artist for 2026.
The festival has played a key part in his career, as I ask him to cast his mind back to the first time he visited. “My first contact with Aldeburgh was through the young artists programme, which is where I first met Ollie Knussen – that would have been 2000 or 2001. I had forced my parents, when I was much younger, to take me to Aldeburgh. It must have been the time when the Humphrey Carpenter biography of Britten came out. I read that biography and begged my parents to drive from Sheffield so I could see the place and go on a pilgrimage. It’s been a very special place to me for such a long time, and since the turn of the century, when I met Ollie, that became the most important musical friendship and mentorship of my life. I spent so much time there and was virtually living at his house for a period. It’s a home to me.”
It is striking in conversations with artists that worked with Knussen, the speed with which his name comes up, and the affection it provokes. In this case, Wigglesworth met his mentor through the soprano Claire Booth. “Claire and I were undergraduates together”, he says, “and she was on the course at Snape. I tagged along, because I wasn’t officially there as a student that first year. Claire and I had already learned his Whitman Settings, and we kept asking if we could sing it to him. He was dreading it was going to be awful, but he finally caved in, and we performed it. I think he was very touched, and I think that was the beginning of him thinking, “Maybe they’re not so bad, these two!”
As with fellow-students, Knussen (above) left a lasting musical and personal footprint. “It was my education. I must have sat in hundreds of hours of rehearsals with the London Sinfonietta and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. I could never understand why no-one else was there, and it was the same when I used to go to Boulez’s rehearsals. That was my education, because Ollie’s rehearsals were masterclasses in time management, efficiently sorting our problems, and that pristine conducting technique. I’m so grateful to have had that as my starting point, and with such a dominant creative force in your life, it takes a while to free yourself from their way of doing it, and finding your own way, but it still informs everything I do. When it comes down to it, it’s still about respect for the text, and that the composer is the most important thing – not the performer’s ego!”
He considers further. “You couldn’t not be learning, just spending time with him, sitting at the kitchen table. As everyone knew him understood, he had obsessions at a particular moment in time. He would be gorging on the music of Busoni, or whatever it happened to be that week, so we’d go through tonnes of his music – and that’s an incredible education, going through those scores together – and learning how he marked up scores. It was my starting point, and I’ve developed it in how to learn a score thoroughly, especially when I’ve had to learn something quite quickly, stepping in for a cancellation. I remember having to learn Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius in two days, and it was incredible to fall back on that technique of inhabiting a score.”
The influence of Knussen spreads to the programming for the 2026 Aldeburgh Festival, where his innovations can be felt in Wigglesworth’s repertoire choices – such as the pairing of his own Piano Concerto and that by Ravel, both to be performed with Steven Osborne (above) as soloist. “It’s a bit of a risk, that one!” laughs Ryan, “putting your piece alongside one of the greatest concertos ever written. That was something I began to think about much more deeply spending time with him, the way pieces resonate together. It’s a very subtle and complex business, and of course you get it wrong sometimes, but that’s fine because you don’t know until you do it, very often. It’s one of the great pleasures to have the freedom you have at Aldeburgh where your wings aren’t clipped. It’s worrying that so much of concert life is becoming so narrow, reduced in its scope and imaginative adventure.”
We reflect on his role as Featured Artist at Aldeburgh this year – a chance to spread musical wings? “It’s very special to be able to think about bringing the different aspects of what I do under one roof, because they’re all sides of the same business of making music. Of course they feature in different ways. Playing chamber music is so important because it’s my only direct contact with producing the sound, and I need that. Yet at the same time, if I’m conducting Pelléas et Mélisande, I hope I’m becoming a better composer as a result!”
His reference is to Debussy’s only opera, with which the festival opens on Friday 12 June. “You can’t not learn from every page of a score like that”, he says, “about how to be a better composer and holding the mystery. I don’t think I’ve ever met a composer for whom that’s not the greatest opera ever written, because it’s so difficult to fathom how he did it! It is so elusive, you can’t see how he put it together. The more time you spend in the orbit of masterpieces like that, it’s stimulating for me as a composer, and to spend time with the orchestra. It’s such an organism, this group of individual musicians with a collective personality, sound and ethos – it’s extremely mysterious! That was the great thing about spending all those hours in rehearsal with Ollie”, he reflects, “that’s what you’re soaking up, how these groups function, and how you balance the double basses and harps – what needs to be done on the most basic practical level.”
The orchestra to which he refers in Pelléas is the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, of whom he has been chief conductor since September 2022. “They are uniquely versatile”, he says, “When you think of what they do in the Tectonics festival, with Ilan Volkov, from the most experimental new music – from that to Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony – and they approach it with care and flair. City Halls is so good for classical repertoire, too, and they are incredibly stylish in Mozart, which is such a difficult thing. It’s incredible what they can do, and in such short spaces of time. To be able to flick the switch is amazing, with something like Birtwistle’s Earth Dances, which we performed with Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony at the BBC Proms last year. To achieve that in such little rehearsal time would have been almost unimaginable in the mid-1980s. The speed with which things are inhabited is incredible.”
On a much smaller scale is The Poet’s Echo, a concert where Wigglesworth will take to the piano, joining soprano Sophie Bevan – his wife – in a programme marking the centenary of the birth of Russian powerhouse Galina Vishnevskaya. Along with her own husband, Mstislav Rostropovich, Galina played an important role in the career and life of Benjamin Britten. Britten’s song cycle The Poet’s Echo was completed in 1965 for Vishnevskaya, and will feature alongside Wigglesworth’s own settings of George Herbert, Till Dawning – written for Sophie (above). “The Poet’s Echo is new for both of us”, he says, “and it is wonderful to have a major work of Britten’s to come to fresh and learn together. We’ve done selections of the folksongs for a good few years, now.”
He has great affection for them. “I love them so much – and those accompaniments in the Britten folk song arrangements, each one is a sort of bull’s eye! There are one or two very focused, simple ideas, and it comes back to Britten’s economy.” A quality Britten and Knussen shared? “Exactly – a supremely practical approach. I learned from Ollie, and almost at Britten’s feet. Ollie’s Dad was so involved with Britten as a conductor, taking part in the premiere of works like Curlew River, and Ollie was there as a kid, taking all this up. He always said about Britten that he could have been a grandmaster chess player, or even an army general. The ability to move things in the abstract, in his head, was so strong, and that extends to planning the entire act of an opera in his mind before committing it to paper. He had an extraordinary ability to manipulate things in space and knowing, in the operas, when to introduce a colour, treating the instruments of the orchestra like individual characters, and knowing when to hold one back for dramatic purposes.”
He reflects further. “It’s about finding the off-kilter but logical solution. A great example is the ‘interview chords’ in Billy Budd – they’re every way of harmonising the F major triad. He’s working through a secret, and it’s absolutely right, a key emotional part of the opera.”
Returning to Wigglesworth’s own music, there is a significant premiere with the Knussen Chamber Orchestra on Saturday 27 June, in the form of his Viola Concerto, written for Lawrence Power (above). “It’s quite difficult to talk about, because I’ve not long finished it!” he confesses. “I’m still too close to the process of having written it, but I haven’t heard it yet. Like all of my recent pieces, and I hope my pieces in the future – they’re all my reactions to who is performing, and who I’m writing for. I think I would struggle now if I were commissioned by a musician or orchestra I don’t know, I’d struggle to have ideas. I’m so lucky with Sophie, or Steven Osborne, who’s playing my piano concerto at the beginning of the festival, to have these long term, meaningful relationships. With Laurence, we first worked together years ago. I wrote these Five Little Waltzes for him during lockdown. He’s such a one-off, and his artistic personality is so strong. He has this incredible sound, and variety of colour, and the piece came from my reaction to that.”
He describes the work. “It’s slightly unusual – in three movements, which sounds very standard, but it’s slow-fast-slow. It was a deliberate attempt to try to achieve something a bit more spacious than anything I’ve attempted before. I suppose it allows the viola to occupy a lyrical space. It’s not a battle between soloist and orchestra, more a fluid relationship. It comes back to the music that becomes more meaningful as a performer. Like Bruckner – I love this music so much, and what can I learn from it? Bruckner’s vision is so personal, but there are things to be learned – how to create a long wave, a big paragraph. It’s finding the things that challenge you, because in the past I’ve struggled to create a genuinely long line. You could say Britten concentrated on little cells of ideas, but it’s nice to think about how to achieve something that doesn’t come naturally, that can become more a part of your make-up.”
Debussy comes to mind as a composer capable of uniting the two ways of working, which returns us to the festival’s opening night. “To have created Pelléas as his first dramatic work, and to have got it that right… it was a long gestation process written it a long time before it was premiered, but it’s unlike anything else!” he says, under Debussy’s spell. “As he admitted himself there is a lot of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov in it, but these scenes tend to be conversations between two characters, with the function of these orchestral interludes, which seem so necessary. To think they were added so late on in the process, just to cover the stage move time, is remarkable – but you need them because of the intensity of each scene. You need the space afterwards to process what you’ve just heard, for the brain to catch up. It’s an incredible living organism, when you’re in it – and it really does grip you! This score is just as much like a drug as Wagner is said to be. The more you spend time with it, the more you need it!”
You can read more about this year’s Aldeburgh Festival at the Britten Pears Arts website, with full concert information and details. For biographical information on Ryan Wigglesworth himself, you can visit his artist page
Clarke Viola Sonata (1919, arr. composer) Debussy Cello Sonata in D minor, L135 (1915) Höller Mouvements (2010); Piano Sonata no.3 (2010-11); Signe ascendant (2024)
NEOS Music 12526 [74’02”] Producers Dominik Weinmann, Marie-Josefin Melchior Engineer Klemens Kamp
Recorded 14-16 April 2025 at Studio 2, Bavarian Radio, Munich
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
NEOS issues an album such as places three contrasted works by York Höller (b.1944) within the context of two sonatas from the earlier 20th century, which all adds up to an illuminating programme when realized with the artistry and perception of those musicians featured here.
What’s the music like?
His most recent piece for an instrument prominent in his output, Signe ascendant has Höller paying tribute to Pierre Boulez on what would have been his 100th birthday via a miniature whose motivic content is derived from the latter’s surname – its lucid and eventful unfolding typical of this composer. Written for a competition organized by Kulturkreis der Deutschen Industrie, the Third Piano Sonata comprises a single movement which is in almost constant evolution; its improvisatory opening phase setting out motifs to be developed in alternately incisive and lyrical episodes towards a conclusion the more powerful in expression through being so methodically attained. Coming respectively 42 and 24 years after his earlier such works, the present piece is no less summatory of Höller’s music at its time of composition.
Its being an ‘abstract’ or ‘imaginary’ ballet makes clear the link between Mouvements and similarly designated works by Höller’s teacher Bernd Alois Zimmermann. Not that it could be mistaken for any other composer – witness the sardonic playfulness of its Entrée, duly intensified in the Pas de deux; the Interlude affords a measure of ruminative while by no means uneventful calm, before the Finale ties up any thematic and conceptual loose-ends via a purposefulness as makes this work more than the sum of its already impressive parts.
The first of a projected six sonatas (only three of which were realized) intended to reinforce his innately French aesthetic, Debussy’s Cello Sonata gets a restrained yet insightful reading – its ‘Prologue’ exuding a fugitive uncertainty brusquely countered by the Sérénade, whose disjunctive gestures are duly channelled into the tensile energy of the Finale.
Even finer as an interpretation is that of the Viola Sonata by Rebecca Clarke, in its highly idiomatic cello transcription. Whether in the restless though precisely gauged musings of its Impetuoso, the speculative dialogue of its central Vivace then rapt serenity of its final Adagio which builds unerringly to the bracing and affirmative close, this is a superb rendering of a work that has (rightly) come into its own during the past quarter-century as a cornerstone of its repertoire.
Does it all work?
Undoubtedly – even if, as a sequence, it might have been preferable to have commenced with the Debussy then continue with the three Höller works and ended with the Clarke. That said, it is easy enough to re-programme the order and this hardly detracts from the persuasiveness of what is heard here; Valerie Fritz and Nina Gurol conveying the specific qualities of the duo works while pointing up stylistic connections between them. Those who know Höller’s Third Sonata through Fabio Martino’s account (Oehms) will likely find Gurol even more insightful.
Is it recommended?
Very much so. Spacious but not lacking definition, the sound is well up to NEOS’s customary high standards and there are succinct if informative booklet notes by the musicians. Hopefully there will be further such combinations of modern and contemporary music from this source.
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Ilan Volkov (above)
Frescobaldi arr Stokowski Gagliarda Seconda (1627/1934) Purcell arr Stokowski Dido’s Lament (1689/1949) Debussy arr Stokowski The Sunken Cathedral (1910/1930) Mussorgsky arr Stokowski Boris Godunov: Coronation Scene (1874/1936) J.S. Bach arr Stokowski Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV565 (c1708/1927) Stravinsky The Rite of Spring (1911-13)
Symphony Hall, Birmingham Wednesday 3 June 2026
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Picture (c) Hannah Blake-Fathers
He might not officially become Principal Guest Conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra until next season, but Ilan Volkov – a valued collaborator over the past two decades – gave notice of his intentions with this enterprising programme of Stokowski and Stravinsky.
Stokowski, that is, in his role as an arranger often interventionist, frequently provocative while always compelling. The first four of these pieces played without break – the hieratic poise of Frescobaldi’s Gagliarda Seconda, with its layering of wind and strings, leading into Purcell’s Dido’s Lament with its soulful interplay of solo and massed strings. This sequence moved up a gear with The Sunken Cathedral, here becoming the most evocative of Debussy’s Préludes as its washes of percussion prepared for an apparition of sonorous splendour before returning to the murky depths. Volkov will hopefully schedule Stokowski’s entire Symphonic Synthesis from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov at a future concert though, for now, the Coronation Scene offered a tantalizing taster as its ringing ostinato patterns built toward a cinematic apotheosis.
It made sense to round off this sequence with Toccata and Fugue, most characteristic of the conductor’s numerous Bach reworkings and the most archetypal of all his arrangements. Its sonic opulence is balanced by an analytical acuity with the orchestral sections stratified so to bring out the motivic intricacy of its Toccata as well as the mounting impetus of its Fugue on the way to a glowering peroration. The CBSO gave its collective all in a piece that, whether or not this is actually by Bach, could not be an arrangement by anyone other than Stokowski.
Stokowski directed the American premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in Philadelphia some 104 years ago and the questing zeal heard in his 1930 recording seemed no less evident in Volkov’s performance – assuredly no powerhouse conception and all the more impressive because of it. With bassoonist Nikolaj Henriques given his head in its plangent Introduction, the first part proceeded stealthily and its myriad shades of detail or expressive nuance given focus through the music’s unfolding at a consistent while unbroken pulse. Such as the innate violence in Ritual of Abduction and inexorable Ritual of the Rival Tribes were drawn into an indivisible whole whose accruing tension found release in a seismic Dance of the Earth.
If the second part emerged more episodically, this was owing more to its actual content than to any interpretative failing. Certainly the diaphanous haze of its Introduction segued with due seamlessness into Mystic Circles of the Young Girls of ominous import. Nor was there any wanton pictorialism in Ritual Action of the Ancestors, with the trenchancy at the start of the Sacrificial Dance a telling foil to the unbridled impetus which followed. Others may have drawn a purely visceral frenzy from this music, but relatively few can have channelled such impetus through to so conclusive and (strange as this sounds) satisfying a final gesture.
Impressive music-making, then, that augurs well for Volkov’s three concerts with the CBSO next season. Hopefully there will also be an opportunity for this conductor to expand on his extensive discography, as part of what should prove an arresting and productive relationship.
To read more about the CBSO’s 2025/26 season, visit the CBSO website. Click on the name to read more on conductor Ilan Volkov, while you can watch him in action in a number of videos below:
Earlier this week we learned of the sad news of the death of Amelia Freedman. In a post on their website, the Nash Ensemble describe Amelia as their “creator and guiding light”, with “an extraordinary gift for creative programming that was appealing as well as broadening musical horizons”. In their obituary of Amelia, the Daily Telegraph described her as “the most influential British classical music impresario of the late 20th century”.
Her work bore fruit both in the concert hall, through the Nash Ensemble’s long relationship with Wigmore Hall that began in 1967, and a long recording career that is noted for its inventiveness and high performing standards.
The discography below is just a hint of what the Nash Ensemble have achieved on record, including a work by Amelia’s good friend, the late Sir Harrison Birtwistle, as well as the String Trio by David Matthews, which he dedicated to Freedman. Also included are a recent recording of Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, a pioneering recording of the attractive Nonet by Sir Arnold Bax, and the vibrant Piano Quartet in B flat major by Saint-Saëns:
Arcana.fm 