The week in classical: La bohème; London Contemporary Music festival – review

Ukrainian soprano Olga Kulchynska is an unforgettable Mimì in Richard Jones’s ever sumptuous Puccini production. And mischief rules at this year’s LCMF

Monteverdi Choir/English Baroque Soloists/Rousset review – joyous and immaculate festive programme

Under the baton of Christophe Rousset, the Monteverdis sounded exquisite in a celebration of Advent that balanced reflection with exultation

La Bohème review – action rather than angst in lively revival

Richard Jones’s 2017 staging returns to Covent Garden with a young and light-hearted group of bohemians. In the pit Speranza Scappucci keeps things moving musically

Christian Gerhaher/Gerold Huber review – Gerhaher is unmatched singing Schumann

This absorbing recital shone a light on some of the composer’s lesser known songs

LSO/Pappano review – postwar Vaughan Williams at his most ferocious and compelling

Antonio Pappano delivered a masterclass in dynamic control with VW’s final symphony, leaving the perennially popular Elgar cello concerto that followed feeling almost toothless

London Contemporary Music festival review – anarchic and provocative, sublime and ridiculous

Cutting-edge composers and sound artists converge for a festival packed with curious works, from scatological panto scores to futurist noise opera, on the theme of tricksters

Alan Titchmarsh, Benjamin Appl and a bevy of Bevans: the best classical Christmas albums of 2024

The gardener turns storyteller, the star baritone keeps it tasteful and family harmony abounds, while the nation’s favourite festive choir is everywhere…

La Rondine review – Pappano and the LSO make Puccini glitter

The London Symphony Orchestra’s concert performance under their chief conductor made a compelling case for Puccini’s little-performed opera

Nikolai Lugansky review – lots of notes, lots of noise, but precious little poetry

However brilliantly he negotiates extreme technical challenges, the pianist’s maximum-velocity playing remains oddly monochrome

Concerto Italiano/Alessandrini review – purity and expressiveness as natural as breathing

Queen Elizabeth Hall, LondonRinaldo Alessandrini and his six superlative vocalists celebrated their 40th anniversary with a return to Monteverdi – the composer with whom they first established their reputation

BBCNOW/Paterson/Wills review – from Joyce’s muse to Point Reyes’s whirling birds

Simon Wills’s new concertante ballet, premiered here, proved engaging but too discursive in a concert that also featured Gabriella Smith’s Tumblebird Contrails and Ives’ first symphony

Messiaen: Turangalîla-Symphonie album review – Yuja Wang’s solo piano dazzles

Wang brings her characteristic brilliance to the obbligato line of Messaien’s symphony, part of a whole that, under Nelsons and the Boston Symphony, doesn’t fully convince

LSO/Volkov review – Lachenmann’s My Melodies offers eerie mutterings, brutal force and unpitched sounds

The work is immensely taxing for orchestra and audience alike but was performed with precision and virtuosity, while, in the second half, a lean and lithe Beethoven’s Seventh made for a gracious companion piece

Schubert, Ter Schiphorst, Andre album review – something old, something new

Alongside a rather brittle Death and the Maiden, contemporary composers Iris ter Schiphorst adds a recorder to a string quartet while Marc Andre’s miniatures study textures

Hasse: Serpentes Ignei in Deserto album review – dazzling performances bring this oratorio of snakes on a plain to life

Thibault Noally captures the exuberance of Hasse’s 18th-century ‘church opera’ originally written for female voices