Conductor John Storgårds pairs Shostakovich’s radical youthful 2nd symphony with the more assured 5th, in performances that emphasise clarity over drama ...

We think these are the greatest symphonies of all time – the biggest, most emotional, most impressive and plain-old flabbergasting works ever written. Nothing beats the sound of an orchestra ...

Mahler's song "Ging heut' morgens" later appeared as a purely instrumental theme in his Symphony No. 1 (Thomas Hampson, baritone). Gustav Mahler died 97 years ago today — May 18, 1911. Today, he's ...

In 1849, Richard Wagner declared, with his usual assurance, that “the last symphony has already been written.” Beethoven’s Ninth, with its eruption of voices in the finale, had, in Wagner’s view, ...

The prodigious young talent has an exclusive recording contract with Decca but his debut – a Sibelius symphony cycle – is frustratingly uneven The Finn Klaus Mäkelä is still only 26, but he has ...

Franz Joseph Haydn never gets the attention he deserves. His friend Mozart and his student Beethoven tend to soak up most of the spotlight, but neither of those guys is called the “father” of anything ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Throughout Shostakovich’s lifetime the most familiar recordings of his symphonies were made by Soviet ...

The opening Allegro immediately delivers a feeling of restlessness, as divided violas accompany the principal subject in quiet agitation. The tone of this subject is both poignant and tense, and ...

The Mendelssohn String symphonies have been fairly well served on record, both quantitatively and quality-wise[1], but ultimately they never quite sounded like youthful Mendelssohnian masterworks but, ...

Def Leppard announced the release of Drastic Symphonies, an album that presents some of the band’s classic songs as classical pieces. The band has “deconstructed and rebuilt not only some of their ...