NME Awards Tour, On tour

Once solely the preserve of young guitar slingers, the NME Awards Tour has lately evolved to offer some different takes on the traditional rock diet. It's a tough assignment, of course. Do you serve up the wildest newcomers? Or those already embarked on their journey? Inevitably, it's somewhere between the two, and this year the emphasis is on what you'd have to call urbane, slightly retro funk-pop (the very good Metronomy; headliners Two Door Cinema Club). Those craving indie rock of the most rebellious kind, meanwhile, will be well-served by the urchin grunge of Camden's Tribes. The most exciting prospect, though, is a proper chance to see Azealia Banks, whose sweary single 212 was a hugely strong debut and whose simple turntable/mic/charisma presentation recalls the early tour set-up of MIA.

O2 Academy Glasgow, Wed; O2 Academy Newcastle, Thu; Manchester Academy, Fri

John Robinson

Justice, On tour

Justice are a great hard rock band, though not quite in the traditional mould. A French duo comprising Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay, they're an act you might consider filing between Daft Punk (their affection for the sound of double-tracked guitar solos from the late-70s and early-80s; being French) and the Prodigy (the unexpectedly hardcore nature of their live show), though they're more interesting than either. Samplers of prog, the pair already borrow from the graphic lexicon of hard rock with their "cross" logo, and have recorded that rocker staple, the live album. Most persuasively though, there's their Audio, Video, Disco LP, with its collaging of rock riffs and synthpop tunes making them sound like a cross between Heaven 17 and Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow. Whether your first language is rock or dance, Justice make themselves readily understood.

O2 Academy Bristol, Thu; O2 Academy Brixton, SW9, Fri

JR

Tim Hecker, London

Tim Hecker's most recent album, 2011's awesome Ravedeath 1972, was built around his recordings made playing a pipe organ at a church in Iceland. An Icelandic church organ not being an easy thing to cart about the place, Hecker's live performances of music from that album have been largely laptop-based. This, however, is a fabulous exception: in the stillness and elegance of St Giles-In-The-Fields church in central London, Hecker will perform two concerts ? it doesn't seem inappropriate to call them "services" ? where he will attempt live what the Ravedeath album ended up comprising, That's to say: Hecker will play the pipes, the music then being crunched, distorted and processed through his effects, before beaming out of the PA in spectacular, slightly delayed fashion. To judge by the immersive sense-confounding shows in which Hecker specialises, this looks likely to be ? at the very least ? revelatory.

St Giles-In-The-Fields, WC2, Mon

JR

Gregory Porter, London

There's been a buzz about young American jazz singer Gregory Porter for a while. Last year, UK audiences finally got personally acquainted with this gifted exponent of a soulfulness worthy of Bill Withers, the jazz agility of Kurt Elling, and a distinctive lyricist's identity mixing intimacy and political realism. Porter's handling of fast music is like an instrumentalist's, but his eloquence as a ballad singer is warm without sentimentality, and his civil rights theme 1960 What? shows him at his most forcefully insistent. Wynton Marsalis has called Porter "fantastic" and Jamie Cullum has described him as "really, really special", but these superlatives have nothing to do with hype, as this four-night run should testify.

Pizza Express Jazz Club, Fri to 13 Feb

John Fordham

Conquering The Antarctic, On tour

It's a century since Captain Scott's ill-starred expedition to the south pole. More than 30 years later the 1948 Ealing film Scott Of The Antarctic, with John Mills as Scott, rekindled the tragic episode for a new generation. Vaughan Williams composed the score for the film, and went on to recycle much of it in his seventh symphony, the Sinfonia Antarctica. To mark the Scott centenary, the City Of London Sinfonia is touring a programme that includes both that symphony and some of the film score that inspired it, interwoven with readings of extracts from Scott's expedition diary. Between the works comes Cecilia McDowell's Seventy Degrees Below Zero, taking its title from the letter Scott wrote "to my widow". Tenor Robert Murray and soprano Katherine Watson also feature.

Corn Exchange, Cambridge, Sat; St David's Hall, Cardiff, Tue; Town Hall, Cheltenham, Wed

Andrew Clements

Thelma, Croydon

Until it came to light in a box of manuscripts in the British Library, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's only opera was thought lost, possibly even destroyed by the composer himself. Written between 1907 and 1909, Thelma was never performed in its writer's lifetime but to mark this year's centenary of his death Surrey Opera is giving it a world premiere in Coleridge-Taylor's home town of Croydon. It's based upon a Norse legend ? the alternative title is The Amulet ? though the libretto, which Coleridge-Taylor wrote himself, is evidently problematic, and has been tactfully edited by the director Christopher Cowell for this production. Joanna Weeks sings the title role.

Ashcroft Theatre, Fairfield Halls, Thu & Fri

AC

Royal Festival Hall, London

Increasingly frail now, the 84-year-old German conductor Kurt Masur is one of those podium veterans who nevertheless manage to obtain orchestral playing of stripped-to-essentials clarity. This was immediately apparent in the Philharmonia's unobtrusive but neatly shaped accompaniment to Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. It also greatly suited the crisply articulated phrasing of Arabella Steinbacher who, like Masur, avoided grand gestures while giving a thoroughly unified account of this most lyrical of concertos.

Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, which came after the interval, would not strike many as a work that holds back on the grand gestures. Yet Bruckner's is the music of a solitary man as well as a fervent Catholic believer. And there is what could be called a Protestant school of Bruckner conducting, of which Otto Klemperer was an outstanding example. Masur is clearly also a follower, always at pains to keep the music within earthly bounds.

He did this by maintaining a steady, moderately brisk pulse through the two opening movements, and by rigorously avoiding the musical equivalent of stopping to look at the view. The orchestra was kept on a tight rein throughout. Masur's Bruckner is always moving through those massive harmonies into the next passage, even at the crux of the adagio ? no cymbal clash for the austere Masur there, naturally ? so that the bleak chorale of mourning for Wagner, which follows, sounded more organic and less of an authorial addendum.

The great virtue of this restrained approach is that it emphasises Bruckner's sense of structure and rhythmic pulse, particularly notable in the scherzo, as well as permitting you to hear the wealth of instrumental detail in the score. Fascinating and memorable, yes ? but in the end (especially for anyone who has Claudio Abbado's Bruckner fifth from last October still in their head) definitely not the full story.

Rating: 3/5

LSO/Tilson-Thomas/Von Otter

Debussy and Weill make a strange coupling in a series devoted to the 150th anniversary of the Frenchman's birth: Debussy's impressionism, probing the depths of emotion and sensation, is far removed from Weill's hard-edged social criticism. Yet for the last of his current LSO concerts, Michael Tilson-Thomas placed The Seven Deadly Sins alongside La Mer and Robin Holloway's orchestration of En Blanc et Noir. It proved enthralling, despite the incongruity.

Anne Sophie von Otter, who played Anna, had also taken part in Tilson-Thomas's all-Debussy programme the night before, which may have had something to do with its success. Her recording of Weill's last collaboration with Brecht remains one of Von Otter's great achievements, despite the changes time has wrought on her voice. There were some forced high notes and moments of unsteadiness. But her exceptional way with words has left her communicative powers reasonably intact, and her Anna, greedily exploiting the sins of others but losing her basic humanity in the process, is chillingly brilliant. A quartet of singers from Synergy Vocals played her appalling family, while Tilson-Thomas was wonderfully alert to the bitter ironies of the score.

He was immaculate when it came to Debussy, too. The colours, contours and menace of La Mer were exquisitely delineated. En Blanc et Noir, originally written for two pianos in 1915, is essentially a war work. The initial opulence of Holloway's orchestration gives way to growling darkness, followed by an uncertain scherzo: unnerving music, beautifully done. The curtain raiser was Danse Sacée et Danse Profane, with Bryn Lewis the solo harpist. The chamber version had also featured in the previous night's concert. Here, we had the full complement of strings in a performance that was poised, sensual and graceful in the extreme.

Rating: 4/5

iO Quartet/Chertock/Odense SO/Mann
(Bridge)

It may be hard to believe from this collection of vapid, middle-of-the-road pieces, but Tod Machover began his career at the forefront of European contemporary music. New York-born, he worked at Ircam in Paris from 1978, researching digital techniques for sound manipulation and composing works that exploited the cutting-edge hardware that emerged. But while he continued to develop new musical technology after he returned to the US in the mid-80s, especially in the series of "hyperinstruments" that extended the potential of instruments such as violin, cello and piano, Machover's own music seems to have become more and more soft-centred. The pieces on this disc all date from the last decade ? one of them, Jeux Deux, is a work for hyperpiano and orchestra, while Sparkler layers real-time electronic treatments on to the live orchestral sound. It's all slickly done, and some of the results are pretty enough, but the musical material is nebulous, and utterly undemanding.

Rating: 2/5

Pollini/Staatskapelle Dresden/Thielemann
(Deutsche Grammophon)

Recorded live at the Semperoper in Dresden in June last year, this was Maurizio Pollini's first appearance with the city's Staatskapelle for quarter of a century. It's even longer since his only studio recording of Brahms's First Piano Concerto, which dates from 1979. The most surprising feature of the new version is that the conductor is Christian Thielemann, not an obvious collaborator for a musician of Pollini's temperament and outlook, yet in practice the partnership works remarkably well. Thielemann's broad-brush expressiveness provides a foil to Pollini's playing, which seems to acquire extra weight and spaciousness from the emphatic orchestra. Some passages have a real theatrical grandeur; the slow movement becomes a rapt hymn. If, overall, the performance doesn't quite match the best in the catalogue ? probably Emil Gilels with Jochum from the early 1970s, or Nelson Freire with Chailly conducting among those from the present century ? it's very impressive on its own terms.

Rating: 4/5

Vladimir Ashkenazy
(Decca)

Vladimir Ashkenazy's 1970s recordings of Rachmaninov's concertos and works for solo piano remain among the finest of this repertoire. But that survey of the piano music was never completed, and it's only now that Ashkenazy has filled in two of its most obvious omissions. Both are early works: the Chopin Variations, based on the C minor Prelude Op 28 No 20, date from 1902, while the First Piano Sonata was finished five years later. Ashkenazy approaches the works with the generosity and dramatic sweep that has always characterised his piano playing, and his tone is as luminous as ever. But there is nevertheless something effortful about the performances, a sense that this is no longer music Ashkenazy can technically take in his stride. There are still glimpses of the great pianist he used to be, but unfortunately they are mingled with passages that make you regret he did not record these works 30 years ago.

Rating: 3/5

Marwood/Power/BBC Scottish SO/Volkov
(Hyperion)

In this country at least, Britten's Violin Concerto seems to be stealthily cementing its place in the concerto repertory; both live performances and recordings seem more and more frequent. This latest version is one of the best so far. Anthony Marwood's slightly detached, rhythmically incisive playing suits the dry, distantly neoclassical world of the Concerto perfectly, and Ilan Volkov marshals an equally crisp accompaniment. Nevertheless, the performance of the Double Concerto for violin, viola and strings seems even more remarkable. Composed in 1932, when Britten was a student at the Royal College of Music, it's one of the works that was only rehabilitated after his death. But here, with Laurence Power joining Marwood as soloist, it was made to seem a wonderfully distinctive and characterful work. Power's raptly beautiful account of the mysterious Lachrymae, the viola-and-strings "Reflections on a song by Dowland", is a final bonus.

Rating: 4/5

LSO St Luke's, London

Besides being regarded as one of the greatest founding fathers of 20th-century modernism, Claude Debussy is also one of music's most intriguing might-have-beens. When he died in 1918, at the age of 55, Debussy seemed to be on the verge of discovering a wholly new musical world. The pieces he wrote in the final years of his life point towards a more austere, more "classical" language, especially the three sonatas that were all he lived to complete of a projected set of six for different instrumental combinations.

As an addition to their orchestral concerts marking the 150th-anniversary of Debussy's birth, Michael Tilson Thomas and principals from the London Symphony Orchestra included all three sonatas in their St Luke's concert, part of the orchestra's UBS Soundscapes series. It was a delightful, immensely accomplished evening, the relaxed tone set by Tilson Thomas's perfectly judged introductions. As well as the sonatas there was the much earlier Danse Sacrée et Danse Profane, with the harpist Bryn Lewis accompanied by a 14-strong string ensemble, while Anne Sofie von Otter sang the three erotically charged Chansons de Bilitis, which encompass the world of Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande in a 10-minute span.

Tilson Thomas accompanied the songs and partnered Tim Hugh in the Cello Sonata and Carmine Lauri in the one for violin. Hugh's robust approach worked well in a piece that has a sense of knockabout humour; Lauri's more moulded playing wasn't quite so effective. Adam Walker and Edward Vanderspar joined Lewis in a perfectly judged unfolding of the Sonata for flute, viola and harp; the most enigmatic of the three sonatas, it emerged as one of Debussy's greatest works.

Rating: 4/5

Coliseum, London

Richard Strauss's lavish romantic comedy returns to the Coliseum in David McVicar's much travelled production, an entirely traditional presentation of a piece that revels in the nostalgic glamour of Vienna in its 18th-century heyday. What marks the current revival as special is the fine stagecraft McVicar applies to it, combined with the vocal and dramatic excellence of its cast.

As the Rose Knight of the title, Sarah Connolly succeeds in impersonating a teenage boy, and in the even trickier task of undertaking his impersonation of a girl. It's a neat piece of double cross-dressing. She also reveals Octavian's ardour, petulance and emotional uncertainty, with an endless supply of rich, creamy tone.

Matching her in youthful spirit is Sophie Bevan as Sophie; her pristine soprano suggesting an effortlessly charming ingenue. As Octavian's mature lover the Marschallin, Amanda Roocroft's silvery tone emanates a distinctive glow, perfectly absorbed into a realisation that combines depth of feeling with self-knowledge.

Crucial to the success of this long evening is Baron Ochs, here undertaken by veteran Sir John Tomlinson. With unerring skill, he manages the audience's developing awareness of a reprehensible rapscallion finally revealed as a total boor. Andrew Shore contributes a febrile, socially nervous Faninal; and among a plethora of small roles, Harry Ward's lairy Leopold, Jennifer Rhys-Davies's fluttery Duenna, Paul Napier-Burrows's earnest Notary and Ericson Mitchell's graceful Mohammed stand out. But there are no weak links in a team whose ensemble playing is crisp and eventful.

The composer is also fortunate to have equivalent champions in the pit, where Edward Gardner provides a keenly alert and immaculately balanced orchestral account, showcasing ENO's players at their considerable best.

Rating: 4/5

Williams/Collins/Bergen PO/Gardner
(Chandos)

Luciano Berio's relationship with the music of the past was complex and productive. His best-known work is arguably the third movement from his 1969 Sinfonia, which grafts a collage of literary and musical quotations on to the framework of the scherzo from Mahler's Second Symphony, while his arrangements spanned four centuries, from Monteverdi to Kurt Weill. Edward Gardner's disc includes two of the more straightforward transcriptions: Sonata Op 120 No 1 turns Brahms's F minor Clarinet Sonata into a shapely work for clarinet and classically proportioned orchestra, while the Six Early Songs give orchestral garb to a group of settings from Mahler's first collection.

Rendering is more ambitious, and closer to the mainstream of Berio's output. Using Schubert's sketches for a 10th Symphony discovered after his death, Berio fixes the fragments into the three-movement scheme Schubert evidently envisaged, filling the gaps with his own music. The result teasingly commutes between the 19th and 20th centuries, with Berio's own music moving in and out of focus as the symphonic structure emerges.

Gardner shapes it all beautifully, and his soloists ? Michael Collins in the Sonata, baritone Roderick Williams in the songs ? are suave and refined. The sleeve notes, though, really aren't up to Chandos's usual standard. To refer to Berio as an "avant gardist" may have been accurate in the late 1950s, but is hardly an adequate description of him in the subsequent 40 years of his life, while the discussion of the sonata arrangement refers at some length to Schoenberg's "celebrated" orchestration of Brahms's F minor Piano Quintet, when, in fact, it was the G minor Piano Quartet Schoenberg transcribed.

Rating: 4/5

Boundaries are being broken across the music world. The industry can capitalise on it if it embraces the spirit of change

Alex Needham's excellent piece on contemporary classical music did a great job of identifying a widespread growth in listener interest in the genre. This trend is not only a bona fide artistic renaissance, but encouraging news for all who invest in music and musicians.

We're currently seeing a melding of genres and a breaking of boundaries across the music world. This recent trend ? listeners moving to the avant garde after they start demanding more from the mainstream? has long been acknowledged within pop. In recent years, mainstream pop artists have even started adopting aspects of the avant garde in their search for fresh output: it's a dialogue that has benefited artists, labels and listeners alike.

Up until now the implications for former "niche" genres ? classical, jazz, world ? have been largely overlooked. In a world where listeners no longer define themselves along firm genre lines, music is increasingly just that ? music. As a result, we are now witnessing a musician-led movement gleefully adopted by listeners, in which classical is being rebranded from the ground up. Even the term "classical" itself seems obsolete in the face of what's being produced and consumed.

A record company works best when it anticipates nascent appetites among the musical public, moves itself into a space where it can tap into them, and uses its influence and resources to nourish them. This trend is no exception. The business must adapt their promotion, their artists and repertoire and their very understanding of classical music in order to capitalise on it, and develop the spirit of change. What's needed is a total collaboration between the mainstream music industry and the classical world at every level, from label to artist to administrator to critic. The industry must find the confidence to put its weight and its wallet behind major projects and artists, while the classical world needs to abandon old attitudes and collaborate artistically, opening its doors to legions of new fans.

Last autumn, Universal Music gathered together a loose thinktank of industry figures, creative and business minds; new projects, ideas and relationships are still springing from this catalyst months later. The ideas being discussed include promoting events and concerts in unusual venues that offer a different kind of experience, including atmospheric lighting and screens. The iTunes festival at the Roundhouse is one such event, and the Yellow Lounge club nights, which are being promoted in Berlin, London and Amsterdam, are other good examples. Wouldn't it be exciting to go to an orchestral concert and rather than look at the conductor's back, be able to see his face on screens? Or have her talk to the audience about the music that is being performed?

We are also convinced there is space for a Hay on Wye-style classical music festival. We have ideas for even more collaboration with TV channels like the BBC and Sky Arts. Perhaps most crucially, young musicians need to be involved in the presentation of their music at a higher and deeper level. When Alice Sara Ott performed at the London edition of the Yellow Lounge last December, she talked to the crowd about what she was playing and what inspired her. You could feel the bond between performer and audience grow as she spoke.

The industry is in an unprecedented position to broker actual sea change, which should remain in place for generations. It's an amazing time to be making classical music, whether in the concert hall or from the boardroom, all that's needed is acknowledgment of this at the highest levels.

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Perth Concert Hall

Alexander von Humboldt, German scientist and explorer, travelled the new world at the turn of the 19th century and wrote his reports in quasi-Romantic prose. His Personal Narrative of a Journey is an odd mix of scientific fact, glum nostalgia for a wilderness that existed before humans messed it up, and prophetic angst for the disappearing rainforests of today. Around the same time, Beethoven was painting happier portraits of people in nature; Scottish composer Peter Nelson takes the Pastoral Symphony and Von Humboldt's Narrative as starting points for Lost Landscapes, a septet commissioned and premiered by the Hebrides Ensemble. Nelson worked with Xenakis in the 80s and shares his sense of meticulous proportion. He treats Von Humboldt's quaint descriptions ("crocodile and boa are masters of the river"; "a deep calm reigned in those lonely places") in careful evocations. The work seems over almost as soon as it begins, Nelson's academic detachment ? he is head of music at Edinburgh University ? creeping in at the edges. But his fleeting images are beguiling. The first segment teems with busy motives over an adventurous walking bass; later, subdued string chords jostle up like giant lily pads on the Amazon.

Lost Landscapes is scored for the same mellow combination of low strings and winds as Beethoven's Septet in E flat, Opus 20 ? the other work on this programme. The Septet was a hit when it premiered in 1800, but has fallen out of fashion; the Hebrides played with polish but didn't convince me to campaign for a major revival. They pick their players from the best of Scotland's freelancers and occasionally lack the intuition that comes from playing together all the time ? palpable more in Beethoven's slow movements than the peppy horn calls and fiddle runs of the finale.

Rating: 4/5

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

We don't hear as much of Swedish-born pianist Peter Jablonski in the UK as we might, which is strange, given that he lives here. He developed a reputation for being a hard-hitting heavyweight, a criticism not borne out by his recent work, in which vigour is offset by great delicacy. There's a maverick quality to Jablonski's programming, however, that reveals an easy familiarity with a repertoire of considerable breadth. His latest QEH recital was no exception.

The first half consisted of two big, moody 19th-century ballades: Liszt's Second in B minor and Grieg's in G minor. Some pianists prefer a bright tone in Liszt, but Jablonski opted for something darker, so that the obsessive left-hand chromatic scales heaved with menace, while the arpeggios and figurations that surround the expansive central melody combined beauty with a deep sense of unease. Grieg's Ballade ? in reality a set of variations on a Norwegian folksong ? has a discursive quality that Jablonski could not disguise, though the emotional range of the performance was immense, with crushing grief in the central lento, and sardonic, angry humour in the scherzando passages.

After the interval came works by Gershwin, Copland and Samuel Barber. The jazzy extroversion with which he tackled Gershwin's Three Preludes for Piano spoke volumes about his fondness for this music, while Earl Wild's transcription of Embraceable You was breathtaking in its dexterity and finesse. Muted and Sensuous, the fourth of Copland's Four Piano Blues, was a wonderful mix of sleaze and elegance. The case for Barber's Sonata ? with its angular lines and sparse sonorities ? could not, meanwhile, have been better put. There was one encore ? Debussy's Feux d'artifice, sensationally played.

Rating: 4/5

Almost every performer or composer I've met cannot stomach hearing their own recordings - even when they're the best you could ever hope to hear. Why not?

Talking to pianist Richard Goode for this week's Music Matters, he said something to me that seemed to take self-deprecation to new heights. I asked him if he listened to his recordings - "absolutely not!" he said, and looked shocked at the very idea. Thing is, that would be a weird reaction if it weren't so common: pretty well every musician or composer I've ever talked to, from Thomas Ade[grave]s to Krystian Zimerman, has said the same thing - that listening to their own recordings, or their own music, is something close to a kind of existential torture.

Now I don't think anyone would expect Simon Rattle to go home and luxuriate in the sounds of his own brilliance with his recordings of the Brahms Symphonies every night to serenade Magdalena Kozena and the kids, or Peter Maxwell Davies to accompany an Orcadian sunset with a favourite CD of one of his symphonies. But for the rest of us who buy, enjoy, and listen again to favourite albums by, among hundreds of others, Richard Goode and Krystian Zimerman, it's strange to think that these recordings seem to be so un-loved by the musicians who made them. Perhaps it's the same thing that many of us experience when you hear a recording of your own voice: that uncanny sense of realising that you sound totally different to the person you hear in your head.

Or could it be something deeper - that hearing old recordings, or a piece from a few years ago, is a psychological block to a performer's or a composer's creativity: "that's who I was, but it's not who I am now"? Or even more dangerous: "I was better back then..."

Glenn Gould was the rare exception, a musician who ended up only communing with the recording studio and having a close relationship with hearing his piano-playing through a pair of speakers. It all presents a strange paradox: that's it's the record-buying/downloading/streaming public who end up having a closer relationship with the recordings our favourite musicians make than the performers themselves.

So Richard, even if you can't stand the thought of listening to them, I'm still going to put on those Beethoven Sonatas. They're not that bad, honest!...

Royal Opera House, London

The second instalment of the Royal Opera's Mozart-Da Ponte cycle is a revival by Harry Fehr of Jonathan Miller's 1995 staging of Così Fan Tutte. In many respects, this is a great performance, one that transcends a number of individual flaws within it.

Its coherence is largely due to Colin Davis's conducting. His lifelong fondness for the work is readily apparent in the subtleties of emotion, colour and meaning he brings to the score. The poignancy that underscores the Così Fan Tutte motto in the overture seems prophetic of the sadness that later seeps into the music as the protagonists' sexual games gradually spiral out of control. It is gloriously played.

You might, however, have minor reservations about some of the casting. Malin Byström's Fiordiligi, taxed by Come Scoglio on opening night, did not fully come into her own until the second act, when the comedy evaporates and emotional uncertainty looms. Michèle Losier's Dorabella, meanwhile, overdoes the self-dramatisation, for which Fehr, who has her downing tranquillisers at one point, may be partly responsible.

Losier does, however, generate considerable erotic charge in her duet with Nikolay Borchev's Guglielmo ? one of the great performances of the role and a beautifully characterised portrait of a man whose bravado masks immense vulnerability. Charles Castronovo's voice has darkened since I last heard him, but he remains an impeccably stylish Ferrando. Rosemary Joshua's brilliant Despina is matched by Thomas Allen's familiar, if dangerously charming Alfonso: the revival marks the 40th anniversary of his Royal Opera debut. This is not, perhaps, a perfect Così, but it is an extraordinarily moving one.

Rating: 4/5