Classical Music

Stand by for another 12 months chock-full of concerts, recitals and exhibitions. And how we are spoilt, from student lunchtime recitals in the wonderful architectural and acoustic spaces of London’s wealth of churches, to vast enterprises undertaken in the major concert halls by our diverse, topflight London orchestras and their attendant virtuoso soloists. And I haven’t even mentioned the summer’s Proms yet. That will be another seventy-odd, eclectic international performers at the Royal Albert Hall – proof that audience numbers for classical music are still in pretty good shape (last year’s season sold out 78 per cent of the evening performances, across eight weeks of concerts.) Feature continues

Anniversaries
If cockney composer Henry Purcell hadlived he would be 350 years old this year, a fact not missed by programmers. And adopted Londoner George Frideric Handel would have been a sprightly 324 had he not been also laid in earth in 1759. Other bigwigs who fall neatly into our obsession with multiples of 50, and who will be celebrated this year, are Felix Mendelssohn and Joseph Haydn, who respectively were born and died in 1809. These events include the London Handel Festival (Feb 23-April 14), directed by harpsichordist Laurence Cummings; and Purcell remembered along with Handel in the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music (May 14-23). The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is doing the honours for Haydn with five concerts (from Feb 10) at the Southbank, and Wigmore Hall has programmed a series of his chamber works (from Jan 11).

Opera
An exciting line-up is promised from oth our major houses. English National Opera has engaged Jonathan Miller once again to pull off another of his iconic productions with Puccini’s ‘La bohème’ (Feb 2-March 8). And the company is taking to the Young Vic theatre again, for ‘After Dido’, director Katie Mitchell’s music theatre based on Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ (April 15-25). But if you fancy the original, the Royal Opera House presents it in a double bill with Handel’s ‘Acis and Galatea’,  directed by choreographer Wayne McGregor (March 31-April 20), while continuing to present as bright a constellation of stars as you are likely to catch anywhere in the world.

Exhibitions
Handel is the focus this year with the Foundling Museum presenting ‘Handel the Philanthropist’ (from Jan 16) and the Handel House Museum exploring ‘Handel: Man and Myth’ (from April 8). The venues continue their Baroque recitals, as does the English Concert, as part of the V&A’s ‘Baroque’ exhibition (from April 4).

Youth
The year begins, as ever, with the young talents of the Park Lane Group at Southbank Centre (Jan 5-9). Another remarkable repository of our future players is The National Youth Orchestra, which begins the season with Berio’s Sinfonietta (Jan 9, at the Roundhouse, NW1), and the Royal Academy of Music will be celebrating 324 years since the birth of Bach by performing all of his church cantatas. Among a plethora of notable events at Southbank, the most anticipated must be the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and its young conductor Gustavo Dudamel. The 200-strong band, formed by their country’s El Sistema project, will be playing two concerts (April 14 & 18). Hopefully, they will be able to inspire us as the UK’s In Harmony scheme gets under way. (Time Out is still collecting unwanted instruments for youth orchestras – www.timeout.com/nostrings.)

Series
The baritone Thomas Quasthoff is taking over as the Barbican’s Artist in Focus with five concerts across the year. Esa-Pakka Salonen, principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra, launches his ‘City of Dreams: Vienna 1900-35’. Not forgetting Kings Place, which continues its mini-series throughout the year. It begins (Jan 14-17) with a more recent anniversary: composer Orlando Gough (born 1959), and will continue ‘Beethoven Unwrapped’, Haydn’s operas, and ‘This is Tuesday’ avant-garde evenings. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s credit crunch time out there and the government is keen that we keep on spending to revitalise the economy; the same applies to classical music, let’s keep going to the concerts, so that they are still there for us to enjoy. In London we have the highest concentration of top-quality orchestras in the world, but it is a symbiotic relationship and they need our support. There is plenty of mediocre schlock out there ready to fill the gap. So, let’s dig deep and keep the barbarians outside the gates and not inside the Barbican.