Many people love to hear great singers but not many cough up £400,000 a year to share their passion with others. Warwick Thompson meets successful lawyer Ian Rosenblatt whose Rosenblatt Recital Series is moving to the Wigmore Hall this month.

Ian Rosenblatt is the senior partner and founder of Rosenblatt Solicitors, one of the City’s most highly regarded commercial law firms. In 2000, he used some of his company’s wealth to found the Rosenblatt Recital Series, the only concert programme in the capital which is devoted exclusively to opera and art songs. ‘It’s really like being a kid in a sweetshop,’ he says. ‘Some people burst into tears when they see a painting, or read poetry. For me, it’s the human voice which has the potential to move me. And now I get to choose to hear all the singers I want to.’

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In the second of his reports from the Proms, our mole picks up dark mutterings in the ranks over Barenboim’s Beethoven symphonies, boredom with Boulez and, would you believe it, applause between movements. The very thought…

In case you haven’t noticed, the near-legendary Daniel Barenboim and his astonishing and courageous band of young Jewish and Palestinian musicians have been in town playing the Beethoven symphonies from soup to nuts. Usually when such an occasion is in the offing, the electricity of excitement crackles along the queues of Prommers that form down the South Steps of the Albert Hall. You only have to think back to Dudamel’s Simón Bolívar performance of Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony in 2011, when it seemed as if the Rio Carnival had been transplanted to the streets of Kensington. So we were expecting something close to a party atmosphere on Friday when we hurried across the park to join the lines.

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The Proms is 118 years old and still packing the Royal Albert Hall over the course of its annual two-month season, this year running from 13 July to 8 September. Standing – not sitting – for each one of the 78 concerts will be the Prommers, those hardy stalwarts who pay no more than a fiver for their front-of-house spot. Each week over the next two months, one of the hardiest, our Secret Prommer, brings you his view from the floor… 

There’s no doubt the best place to enjoy ‘the world’s greatest classical music festival’  is standing literally a matter of feet from the world’s greatest conductors, soloists and orchestras. It’s this very intimacy – in such a huge venue – that lends Prommers their feeling of ‘ownership’.  These are as much our concerts as the BBC’s. The finest fiddlers and flautists play uniquely for those of us standing head-height to their kneecaps. Read more

No guesses for knowing where Opera Holland Park puts on operas but perhaps you didn’t know the London company performs only in the summer, that it gives away thousands of free tickets each year and that it’s funded not by the state but by benefactors, sponsors and the local council. So what’s an OHP performance like and more important, are the punters impressed?

We sent Hannah Nepil to give it the once-over and meet the two founders, with Simon Fernandez on his camera. We’ve also created a playlist and have a ticket giveaway too.

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The Aurora Orchestra are an interesting, forward thinking group that we really connect with and took notice of earlier this year at the Roundhouse Reverb Festival. They sent us this exclusive video of viola player Max Baillie and dancer Sarita Piotrowski in a stunning duet, as a taste of what to expect in the orchestra’s upcoming event Battle in London.

Click below to play the exclusive video

We caught up with their conductor Nicholas Collon at a recent rehearsal and took our camera down and got some great pictures of the dancers in action.

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Charlotte Gardner heads to English National Opera to find Blur frontman Damon Albarn dangling his feet over the stage in a new production that is an opera but not as you know it…

Damon Albarn has set a bit of a musical conundrum with Dr Dee, his new opera co-commissioned by Manchester International Festival, the London 2012 Festival, and the English National Opera. The conundrum is this: what exactly is an opera, and at what point does an opera become so un-operatic (whatever that means), that it simply ceases to be one?

Certainly, Albarn’s structuring of Dr Dee as an 18-track album is not the classical norm. Neither is it common for the singers’ voices to be amplified, or for those singers to be a mix of operatic, Early Music, pop and music theatre voices. In fact the most conventional aspect of Dr Dee‘s make-up is the instrumentation, and that’s saying something.

The classical orchestra in the pit is partnered by an Early Music ensemble suspended over the stage. Then, amid the recorders, viols and hurdy gurdy sit an African kora player and Albarn himself, hugging his guitar and singing much of the evening solo in a commentator role reminiscent of Shakespeare’s fool of King Lear.

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Dudamel, Dudamel, Dudamel…that’s what it felt like everyone was saying last week. And you’d be forgiven for thinking he was the only performer at last weekend’s Sounds Venezuela festival at the Southbank Centre. But you’d be wrong, as Harry White found out. He gives us a rundown of some of the musical initiatives on show.

How would you go about changing the world? Through its Festival of the World, the Southbank Centre thinks it might have the answer and has given us a taste in the form of the four day Sounds Venezuela festival, running over 23-26 June. Its weapons of choice? Art and education. Or to be more specific; colour, noise, mess, energy, laughter and a whole lot of music. Oh, and did I mention the children? Hundreds of inspirational young musicians from across the UK and Venezuela coming together in what can only be described as an explosion of sound to interact, learn and perform with one another. Do I sound enthusiastic? Well, you had to be there, and luckily I was.

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Five years ago she was a struggling pianist but today Valentina Lisitsa has 45 million followers – and last night 3000 of them came to her London concert

Valentina Lisitsa certainly knows how to make people sit up and take notice. On Tuesday night, this practically unknown Ukrainian concert pianist made her London début not at some suitably chamber-sized venue, but in the gargantuan 5000-seater Royal Albert Hall. As if things couldn’t get any more unorthodox, the concert was was streamed live on Youtube achieving almost 2800 views at its peak, the repertoire itself was chosen by her online audience, and the performance was recorded for release by Decca.

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