The January Guide

2012 is here at last! Christmas is over, and for all the family pleasures, it is not a great time for live music in London, so I am also happy to get back to my normal routine of art things, which is my profession, and going to hear live music, which is something I so love doing.

Best Way to Start the Year: Five-day Music Festival
For me, the New Year has always started in the same way – with contemporary music performed by young and upcoming musicians. In the first days of January, starting this year on Monday 9, the redoubtable John Woolf, who has been running, as far as I can tell, single handedly for over 50 years, an organisation called somewhat mysteriously The Park Lane Group, stages a five-day festival of young music and musicians in the Purcell Room on the Southbank next to the Royal Festival Hall. This is where you realise how much talent there is all around, and I cannot recommend these evenings highly enough. Try to dip into them. Five composers will be specially featured, including Thomas Adès, Anthony Payne, John McCabe, Thea Musgrave and Poul Ruders, and no less than 45 young performers. These concerts have a very exclusive insider feel to them, but they are also very stimulating, and I always enjoy going.

The Barbican's Exciting January Programme & Two Residencies
One has to say that the Barbican Concert Hall has an equally extraordinary, innovative and exciting programme in January. Difficult to reach, and even more difficult to leave, this monstrous edifice by the fathers of the City of London, nonetheless has so many great events that you just have to force yourself to go. I could easily spend about ten evenings there quite happily. On Tuesday 10, Tony Pappano is conducting the LSO in a wonderful programme of British Symphonic music including Adès, Walton, and Elgar's First Symphony. On Friday 13, the man I believe to be the greatest British conductor, Oliver Knussen, is conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a concert of 20th century music, including Miaskovsky's 10th Symphony (he wrote 27 in all). Miaskovsky is an almost unknown member of the Russian musical avant-garde. His work uses huge forces and made me hungry to know very much more of this composer who is known about, but hardly heard. The rest of the programme, including a world-premier by Alexander Goehr, and Schoenbeck's classic Chamber Symphony, is unmissable. Thomas Adès himself is conducting the LSO in a programme of Mahler and his own music. He is one of the two wunderkinder of his generation in British music – a pianist, a conductor and, above all, a composer of remarkable talent. Then there are two riveting residencies, The Kronos Quartet will be at the Hackney Empire and at the Barbican on January 24-27, performing Georg Crumb's legendary Black Angels, a highly unorthodox, Vietnam War-inspired work featuring bowed water glasses, spoken word passages, and electronic effects. On January 28-29, there are two days that celebrate the work of Jonathan Harvey. If you like the spiritual synthesised through the electronic, he is your man. He has never been my favourite composer, but a lot of people love his work, and I have to say I am quite intrigued by the UK premiere of his opera called Wagner's Dream. After all, Richard Wagner himself had plans to write an opera about the life of the Buddha, which he never fulfilled!

"Mozart's Grand Partita for 13 instruments – you cannot believe this piece of music was ever conceived or composed…It made me cry for days, and if you have never heard it, go and have the same revelation"

Not to Miss at Royal Festval Hall
Meanwhile, back at the the Royal Festival Hall itself, two concerts catch my eye especially. One is in fact a group of concerts with the LPO under their Chief Conductor, Vladimir Jurowski – all devoted to the music of Prokofiev, composer of course of the ballet Romeo and Juliet – some of which is rarely performed. But just as exciting for me will be the Philharmonia Orchestra performance, with their own Chief Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, performing not only Beethoven's 5th, but also an opera written by Luigi Dallapiccola, called The Prisoner, written between 1944-48, and, like Beethoven's symphony, is a great cry for freedom. I have only heard it once before, and want to hear it again.

Opera Recommendations
In all this this context of exciting contemporary music in the concert halls, the opera world of London is conservative during January, though I want to go to see and hear Tosca at the ENO at the London Coliseum, which by all accounts has a very exciting production, and is very good musically. If you have never been to the opera before, you could do no better to convert you to this wonderful art form – or take a friend who has never been!  The Royal Opera House are starting a Mozart Cycle, but I can't really recommend the Don Giovanni – rather wait for the Cosi fan Tutte and the Marriage of Figaro in February – they will be better all round I suspect.

Mozart's Music Miracle at Wigmore Hall
And then once again, the Wigmore Hall. What can one say? There are so many concerts worth recommending. You could go most nights in January, and get concerts of extraordinary quality – great singers, string quartets and other groups. Starting with my friend Christian Blackshaw, who studied in Russia and has a very sensitive and personal style, commences on January 5 a cycle of Mozart Piano Sonatas, which should be revelatory – to a concert on Friday 27 by the remarkable British clarinetist, Michael Collins, who is joined by a group of friends playing Mozart's Grand Partita for 13 wind instruments. This work, which is almost an hour long, is a musical miracle – I can remember so clearly first hearing it on the wireless, as it was called in those days, when I was a student and babysitting for a professor. You cannot believe this piece of music was ever conceived or composed. It made me cry for days, and if you have never heard it, go and have the same revelation.

Norman Rosenthal spent more than thirty years as director of exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts. Since he was nine-years-old, he has been haunting London's many concert and opera venues, large and small, absorbing classical, opera and contemporary music, all of which he enjoys in equal measure.