Two things occur to me, writing this blog. One is the need to explain why I am writing it, and the other is to put on record how much I love British arts and culture too. I am truly fortunate to live in the arty English town of Lewes, an hour away from London by train. I want to give you an idea of why I go to London and why I think it is still one of the great cities of the world. For me, it’s the place where I go most often to satisfy my life-long passion for music and art. In the one year I document here, I have been truly inspired by what I’ve seen and heard in good ol’ London Town.

Of course, also for the record, and for all this stuff about the wonders of Europe and, the UK’s foolishly severed relationship with it. I love London – scroll on to see some of my reasons for so doing.

One last thing – if I give the impression of being a bit of a globe-trotter, the truth is that mostly, as all writers, I spend most of my time in a small room here in the lovely town of Lewes in Sussex. In fact, friends tell me that I don’t. go out enough.

27th March 2025

Marie Lys, soprano, Elina Garanča, mezzo-soprano, Piotr Beczala, tenor, William Thomas, bass, Philharmonia Chorus, Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Riccardo Muti.

“Neil Fisher, chief music critic of The Times recently interviewed Riccardo Muti and aptly described him as the last of the ‘Big Beasts’. Tickets for this concert were like gold-dust, the hall was packed to the gunwales; there were people standing (with paid tickets) at the rear of the stalls. This was not simply another concert – it was a major musical event…It was not only a huge pleasure to attend this concert, but it was also a privilege and certainly one for the record books.” John Rhodes, Seen and Heard International.

27th March 2025

Petrarch’s rave review has it right. Conquering the heart is what Martini and other 14th-century painters from Siena do in the National Gallery’s devastatingly exact, epochal exhibition about the moment western art came alive. Simone’s painting of Laura is lost but you see why he was the artist for the job. He is so expressive, so tender, exploding any idea of medieval art as remote. Jonathan Jones, The Guardian.

29th April 2025

29TH APRIL 2025

Legions of keyboard fans know that Víkingur Ólafsson  does reflective like few others. Calmness, softness of touch and introspection are among the Icelandic pianist’s widely admired trademarks. It helps make him a perfect performer for the AirPod age……but how does Ólafsson respond to a full orchestra in a large-scale work such as Beethoven’s third piano concerto? The answer, in this opening concert of the Philharmonic Orchestra’s celebrationary 80th season, is that he does it with enviable ease. 

Before the concerto, Santtu-Matias Rouvali conducted the UK premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s Si el Oxígeno Fuera Verde, which the orchestra had premiered in Amsterdam the previous day. Described by the composer as a fragile green murmur of life, the environmentally inspired work is delicately scored as a bubbling forest of gentle arpeggios and trills, which eventually coheres into an insistent dance with echoes of John Adams and the Stravinsky of The Rite of Spring.

Alongside Ólafsson, who stayed to listen to the second half of the concert, the evening’s star attraction was the Royal Festival Hall organ being played at full throttle. With Notre Dame cathedral’s Olivier Latry at the organ controls, and Rouvali neatly alive to the work’s overall architecture and colours, Saint-Saëns’s third symphony is a guaranteed crowd pleaser for a special occasion – and so it proved.  Martin Kettle, The Guardian

The result is a show that feels adventurous and fresh. Reconsidered by Tsang and Fuenteblanca, his art springs to life. And to top it all, in the show’s climax, we get The Three Dancers displayed on a pretend stage, lifted up in lights for us to examine properly and dramatically. The “dancers” are two women and a man, their figures twisted spikily into an edgy tango. The woman on the left is grimacing grotesquely. The man on the right is silhouetted mysteriously. The dancing nude at their centre seems to be the focus of their tension.

We’re watching a tug of love. I was reminded immediately of Princess Diana’s lament about three in a marriage being a bit crowded. Picasso has cast the central figure in the Camilla Parker Bowles role.The man is clearly Picasso, reduced, typically, to a silhouette. The screaming woman on the left is, surely, his Russian wife Olga, whom he had begun to caricature nastily in his art. The dancing nude is a lover who has come between them.The Tate has other theories and we’ll never know for sure. But what’s excellent here is how excitingly the show has framed the possibilities. It’s been a long time — several years — since an event as stimulating as this opened at Tate Modern. If it were up to me I would leave these rooms exactly as they are for ever, as a thrilling tribute to Picasso. Waldemar Januszczak, Waldemar.tv

2nd November 2025

Is home a place, a feeling, or an idea? Suh asks timely questions about the enigma of home, identity and how we move through and inhabit the world around us. Tate Modern.

2nd November 2025

Kngwarray’s paintings might well remind you of a kind of gestural abstraction they have nothing to do with, and which the artist would never in any case have seen. The things we look at in Kngwarray’s art are about an entirely different order of experience to the similar kinds of brushstrokes driven this way and that around other, more familiar canvases we might also find in Tate Modern, where her retrospective has arrived from the National Gallery of Australia. But this similarity is also one of the reasons Kngwarray became famous in the first place. Adrian Searle, The Guardian.

2nd November 2025

Installation by Carlos Cruz-Diez, 2019.

‘When light comes into contact with an artwork, it changes it completely. My challenge is to reveal to the viewer a reality without a past or a future: my works exist in a perpetual present.’

2nd November 2025

‘Rather unusual for ‘contemporary’ composers, Christian Lindberg actually has his ‘own identity’ – a voice of his own – and not at all derivative of other composers, as tediously customary in ‘contemporary’ music. Lindberg’s Trombone Concert No.4, is a mesmerising masterpiece and was warmly received by an enthused audience.

The elegantly elfistical Santtu-Matias Rouvali conducted a completely flawless performance of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (subtitled ‘A Soviet artist’s practical, creative reply to just criticism’) with all tempos correctly judged from beginning to end: accents, clarity, phrasing, and dynamic range were exceptionally well-judged eliciting a highly charged emotional intensity from his immaculately tuned world-class orchestra.’ Alexander Verney-Elliott, Seen and Heard International.

16th January 2025

Indeed, anyone not au fait with the story of Gesualdo’s colourful life would be perplexed by much they saw here, especially as his two wives appear to be played by the same actress. No help is given in terms of texts (they’re printed in the programme but there are no surtitles) or other factual information.

The show is better seen… as a theatrical representation of Gesualdo’s tortured psyche as reflected in his shockingly chromatic harmonies, rather than a representational biopic. On that level it’s powerful and engrossing, the music extending far beyond contemporary Mannerism to something more like 20th-century Expressionism, expressing deep psychological trauma. Barry Millingon, The Standard.

19th February 2025

The distinctions are so often invoked that some find it hard to believe these artists could have anything in common. Which is precisely the twist of this show. It wants us to look far more closely at these minds and hands at work, and to discover fundamental similarities when the two are brought together. In its originality and insight, its brilliant selection and compelling texts, this is one of the most exhilarating shows I’ve ever seen. Laura Cumming, the Observer.

19th February 2025

Bruckner Symphony No. 8, Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Lawrence Renes 

A rare appearance in the UK by Sir Donald Runnicles, a longtime fixture of the German classical music scene, had prompted excitement among audiences in London. The proposition of hearing him conduct the Philharmonia in Bruckner’s Symphony no. 8 in C minor stirred the musical loins of Bruckner-lovers, and there was a palpable buzz at the Royal Festival Hall on the evening. Alas, Sir Donald was indisposed, but Lawrence Renes gamely stepped in at short notice to lead the orchestra in the Haas edition of the score.

‘The performance of the symphony (Bruckner’s 8th Symphony) was nothing short of glorious and much of that must be due to Renes’s muscular conducting. His grasp of the structure of the work was palpable, and he revelled in the frequent volcanic eruptions in the work. The Scherzo oozed rhythmic energy, the three harps glistened. The long Adagio started very slowly and I feared the conductor was going to ignore the composer’s express direction Feierlich langsam, aber nicht schleppend (Ceremonially slow but don’t drag); thankfully, Renes soon imposed a slightly faster tempo. He built up the many climaxes with great skill, and the Wagner tubas shone. Indeed, the orchestra played magnificently across all sections, blended woodwind, firm strident brass, thundering timpani (Simon Carrington), mellow horns (led by Lasse Mauritzen) and the percussionist enjoying his two cymbal clashes: and all held together by the lithe and energetic Leader, Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay.

I am now thinking of starting a new blog entitled ‘Bring back Renes’ – or even, ‘Where’s Renes? Perhaps the Philharmonia will invite him back in a coming season with, say, Bruckner’s Fourth? I live in hope; but also hope Sir Donald, restored to full health, will return to a London podium very soon.’ John Rhodes, Seen and Heard International

19th March 2026

What stands out from the outset is the shift in perspective. Rather than presenting modernism as a story that begins in Europe and spreads outward, the exhibition recognises Lagos, Zaria, Ibadan and Enugu as major centres of artistic innovation in their own right. This reframing will resonate strongly with Black British visitors familiar with how cultural histories can be sidelined in mainstream institutions. Here, Nigeria is not the supporting act — it is the focus.

Written by Black History Month UK. 18/11/2025

19th March 2026

There was a time when London’s walls were papered with Mahler 2s; certainly, in the 1980s, performances were regular occurrences with nary a month going by without one or other of the capital’s concert halls having its roof blown off by massed choirs belting out Klopstock.

The Mahler craze has quieted, but there is always space for the mighty sonic edifice of the Second. Fittingly, given the prominence of the brass in Mahler, this performance was dedicated to the memory of trumpeter John Wallace, former Principal Trumpet of the Philharmonia Orchestra….

…Kent Nagano’s Mahler is a known entity, and shares with his Wagner (his ongoing historically-informed Ring cycle in particular, closing with Götterdämmerung in Dresden in May) an x-ray awareness of detail. This was an individual interpretation of the highest rank, as Nagano manages to pair that sense of detail with an awareness of the big picture, allowing climaxes to really register (another commonality with his Wagner).

Nagano also has the ability to create just the right momentum, a trait important everywhere but maybe especially so in the symphony’s opening paragraphs. His conducting technique is near-infallible, too: of all the many Mahler 2’s I have heard, none contained such perfectly controlled Luftpausen as this. Nagano gave space for the contrasting themes; again, just the right amount. It is worth mentioning some individual contributions from the orchestra that stood out: first horn Laurence Davies, and cor anglais player Maxwell Spiers…

…A simply superb trombone solo from Matthew Lewis was another highlight of the evening, as was the velvety sound of trombones and tuba at the ‘Dies irae’ theme. The finale is a movement of extremes, and Mahler piles on the scoring in true late-Romantic fashion. Somehow, Nagano made sense of the thorniest passages like few before him, while honouring the Modernism of the score, more notably in those proto-Ivesian moments of thematic juxtaposition…

…The placing of the off-stage contributions was carefully and effectively thought-through. Jane Archibald was just as special a soloist as Bock, her soprano the perfect complement to Bock’s mezzo. But it was Nagano that choreographed the great choral climax so perfectly, the Philharmonia Chorus beautifully soft on entry, the male voices later creating an imposing wall of sound, Nagano extending the silent pause after ‘Bereite dich’ daringly, as if himself asking, ‘Prepare yourself for what?’. ‘To live,’ came the answer, and how beautifully Archibald crowned the chorus. The Philharmonia Chorus could only be described as fearsomely present in the work’s final stretch; and yet the brass crowned it all, perfectly. Good to hear the RFH organ at full tilt, too. Colin Clarke, Opera Today.

The post Me Going to London and Having a Great Time 2025 – 2026 appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

My first sighting of Finland, land of lakes, forests, saunas and music, seen from the air on a scheduled flight to Helsinki.

It all started six months earlier, in the Runaway Cafe on platform two at Lewes Station, UK, my home town. I am not talking about my journey to catch the plane to Finland. It was March 2022, I was having a coffee before the London train arrived and the radio behind the counter was playing Sibelius’ most well-known piece, Finlandia. I was going to London for a day at the British Museum for The Stonehenge exhibition, which I truly enjoyed. The only trouble was that tune. I could not get rid of Finlandia all day.

In all honesty, I was wishing I could hear the whole piece on my home sound system and I didn’t want to wait until I got back, but I had to. Of course, being an obsessive kind of man, it wasn’t good enough just to listen to Finlandia, love it though I do, especially as played by an orchestra called The Lahti Symphony Orchestra (Sinfonia Lahti), conducted by Osmo Vänskä. No, I decided that I had to listen to all seven of Sibelius’ symphonies again, in numerical order, of course. It had to be the versions by the Lahti Symphony Orchestra too. If you don’t know these recordings, please find them somewhere, they are truly inspiring and, I thought, without any proof or even any knowledge what that actually means, they are very Finnish.

I hadn’t given the orchestra’s name a lot of thought, but it had occurred to me that Lahti was a strange sort of word and, of course, I couldn’t speak Finnish. I didn’t know what a Lahti was, maybe a type of milky coffee, or who Lahti was, or where Lahti was. So, with Sibelius fully enthroned in his rightful place back in my brain, I decided to google Lahti. Ah, yes, it’s a relatively small town in Finland which has its own symphony orchestra, famous for its recordings of Sibelius’ music. They had a state of the art orchestral hall too, by a lake, The Sibelius Hall, which, I now read, had first class, world class, acoustics. And then the big moment. Drum-roll, please Lahti Symphony Orchestra: every year Lahti holds a Sibelius Festival with its resident orchestra, in the Sibelius Hall and playing only Sibelius’ music.

So there I was, heading North, sitting on a Norwegian Airways flight from London Gatwick to Helsinki Airport at the end of August 2022. It was my first visit to any of the Nordic countries and, for someone who had been going on holiday every year to Italy, this was definitely going to be something different.

Helsinki from the air and, beyond it, the Baltic Sea.

This is the impressive modern building that is the Sibelius Hall in Lahti. I was truly excited to get here, but I was knocked out by the architecture and its setting.

The Lahti Symphony Orchestra (Lahti Sinfonia) with its principal conductor Dalia Stasevska, who is also the festival director, gave three concerts of Sibelius’ music. His Symphonies Nos. 4 and 7 and the great late work, Tapiola, a tone poem that some people call his 8th symphony. There were also a number of the composer’s other tone poems and two rare performances of his music for narrator and orchestra, The Wood-Nymph and Snöfrid.

The Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska is already known for her passionate, dramatic and rhythmically exciting interpretations of a whole range of composers’ works – including many contemporary Finnish composers. As well as being the Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor, from 2021 until 2025, her first principal conductor’s post, she is also the principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra where she became better known to British audiences after she conducted the Last Night of The Proms in 2020.

Now she is even on the cover. of this month’s Gramophone Magazine (April 2024), and it is, by now, patently obvious that she will soon be taking a giant, and well-deserved, leap into the top ranks of international conductors.

I will remember particularly her emotional commitment and her ability to transmit that feeling to us in the audience, especially in profoundly serious performances of Sibelius’ great twin other-worldly masterpieces, Symphony No 7 and Tapiola. Look carefully, if you can be bothered, I am sitting, transfixed, four rows back, on the left, feeling privileged and moved to have been there.

The opening concert of the festival was impressive too, with the Estonian Festival Orchestra conducted by the Estonian-American conductor, Paavo Järvi, the orchestra’s chief conductor and founder, but also chief conductor of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo. They played Sibelius’ thrillingly late Romantic Symphony No. 2 and his dramatic quasi-symphony, Lemminkäinen, setting some episodes from the life of Lemminkäinen, the reckless, flawed and deeply human hero from Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala, with its mystical Isle of the Dead guarded by the black swan of Tuonela.

 Lemminkäinen : Thus became a mighty hero. In his veins the blood of ages, 
Read erect and form commanding, Growth of mind and body perfect 
But alas! he had his failings, Bad indeed his heart and morals, 
Roaming in unworthy places, Staying days and nights in sequences 
At the homes of merry maidens, At the dances of the virgins, 
With the maids of braided tresses (Rune IX, The Kalevala)

During the intervals to the concerts, the audience retreated to enjoy the appropriately inspiring architecture of the Sibelius Hall (Sibeliustalo), completed in 2000, it is the work of Finnish architects, Kimmo Lintula and Hannu Tikka, continuing what is by now Finland’s international reputation for great architecture.

The concert hall’s acoustics are, as I had read, as good as you get, and its pin-drop clarity encouraged the audience to sit silently and it also allowed the orchestras to play to their full range – from fortissimo to pianissimo with no loss of detail. In the interval, we could also catch those famous Finnish sunsets over the lake. I know that Sibelius is much more than just a Finnish composer, he’s one of the greatest masters of music, and his works are not really ‘about’ Finland, but the Sibelius Hall in this setting, after some great performances of his music, can’t help but remind us that his inspiration wherever it came from, can’t have been unaffected by the Nordic beauty of his homeland.

Up these intriguing musical stairs, on the other side of town, is the Lahti Conservatory of Music, (Lahden konservatorio), where there was also a piano recital given as part of the festival and, this year, focusing on Sibelius’ less well-known genre, piano music.

The young Danish pianist, David Munk-Nielsen (born 1998), still studying for his master’s degree at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, and was already an award-winning pianist He won first prize in the Tampere Piano Competition as well as the Tallinn Piano Competition – and in both competitions he played Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto, not for the faint-hearted, in the finals. In his Lahti Sibelius recital, he played three sets of piano pieces from the beginning and the towards the end of the composer’s creative life. Ten Pieces, Op 24, are examples of Sibelius’ early, Liszt-inspired virtuoso works; Five Pieces, Op. 75, The Trees, and Five Pieces, Op. 85, The Flowers, are sets of often gnomic miniatures, each title the name of a tree or a flower, and the music is, well this is Sibelius, a lot more interesting than their names suggest. David Munk-Nielsen played them with the seriousness they deserve and, where necessary, the virtuosity that says much for his future.

You have to take trees seriously in Finland, it is the most forested country in Europe, the great northern forest. A small piece of this forest, in southern Finland they are a mix of deciduous and evergreen, spreads down almost as far as the Sibelius Hall in Lahti in what is called Kariniemi Park, which also contains the Lanu Sculpture Park, featuring the work of Finnish sculptor Olavi Lanu (1925 – 2015), who took trees seriously too. His works are often made in concrete but disguised as if they are growing in the forest – which in Kariniemi Park, they are, if you see what I mean.

Walking in the park, I felt that I had a real if small-scale taste of what that the Finnish forest, further north, is truly like. A desire was born to explore further into Finland’s natural landscape while I walking down wooded paths to the equally Finnish landscape of lakes.

Also bordering onto trees in the centre of Lahti is the Lahti Museum of Visual Arts Malva – mostly known simply as Marva. It was obvious from my first visit that the people who run it have just the right attitude to the modern and the historic and that they have very good taste too. Their main exhibition, when I was there, was by the Dutch conceptual artist, Maarten Baas.

Dutch artist, Maarten Baas’ exhibition, Hide and Seek, was full of surprises, jokes and insights into what we sometimes call, wrongly, the everyday.

Maarten Baas does some amazing things with smoke and mirrors too. His burnt objects, many of them of iconic pieces, was truly dramatic and not a little disturbing….I can still smell the burning.

Lahti is not just a place for great music and art, forested walks and lakes, it is also, yes, a nice town. I suspect it is also a very Finnish town – orderly, organised, efficient and modern – an extremely pleasant place. I like its understated charm a lot. Finland feels like a modern place to me, and I really like the way that the oldest buildings in Lahti all seem to be 20th century. It feels like Lahti lives in the present and the future – that gives me hope. It is also a great place for a coffee or a drink in civilised surroundings.

Lahti’s main church, the Church of the Cross (Ristinkirkkko), was built in 1978. Another piece of fine modern architecture. Today, it was holding a wedding. So simple but so effective this display of sunflowers – no happy couple could help. but me moved by its simple but profund statement of hope and good wishes. The church, by the way, has been the location for a lot of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s highly-regarded Sibelius recordings.

Home for this week, was a modern apartment in a modern apartment block, in a modern apartment estate, right in the middle of town and a short walk from Sibelius Hall.

I know that the Finnish winter is harsh but the Finns are ready for that. They are natural designers. The doors fit, the locks lock with a delightful clunk, they stay shut too in a gale. Here, in my temporary home, the obsessive in me loved the way everything worked and looked smart as well as functional. This lift, for example, nicely lit, smoothly opening and closing doors and a purring swish gave me great pleasure every time I used it.

A lot of Lahti citizens live in these type of developments and, unlike many other apartment blocks I’ve seen in other countries, here I think , you are lucky citizens to live here.

There was even a place for me at the back, in that nicely designed communal garden, so I began each day, as I try to wherever I go, doing my kungfu and tai-chi practice – overlooked by some curious residents who only registered their surprise with a slight flicker of a smile and a friendly Hei.

After tai-chi, what better, most Finns would agree, than a hot sauna back in the apartment. Sauna is the only Finnish word to enter the international vocabulary. It means, yes, sauna and it is genuinely a part of every day life in Finland. You feel great afterwards, believe me.

Down the street, turn right and five minutes away is another world. Well, as you can see below, a themed restaurant that isn’t into the idea of hiding its ideas. Viking Restaurant Harald (Viikinkinkiravintola Harald) is just what it says the moment you see it. At first I was reluctant to go in. I suspected it would be all embarrassing theme park entertainment with terrible theme park food, but I was wrong. The decor has a sense of humour. I know that Vikings were not exactly what the comic books portray. My father’s family came from the Scottish Hebrides and some of our ancestors have Viking names, so I am a softy for my Viking heritage, even if I do know for a fact that Viking never wore two-horned helmets, and I certainly never thought I would wear one, but….

…never say never. When in Lahti’s Viikinkinkiravintola Harald, after a few Viking beers, and a very good meal (honestly, the food is first class), almost anything can happen. But, before I go, let me leave you with members of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, who have given me so much pleasure here in Lahti. They are performing their Covid lockdown version of Sibelius’ Finlandia, each musician in his or her own home studio. Kiitos ja kippis! I shall be back!

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