A month in classics: February 2026
Our guest classical music picker, Huw Lewis selects five classical concerts from a busy programme to look/listen out for in the North East over the coming weeks
Baroque rolls into Durham to lift off the roof
The best choral music of the Baroque is bold and full of drama and energy. And among the best single pieces of that time is Vivaldi’s Gloria: I can think of few better places to hear it than lofty Durham Cathedral (unless you can afford a ticket to St Marks in Venice itself).
As for the energy, that will come from the North East teenagers who join forces with professional singers and musicians on February 12 to become Paul McCreesh’s Gabrieli Roar.
Along with the Gloria there are also two of Purcell’s miniature masterpieces, The Bell Anthem and Come Ye Sons of Art, just to get us in the mood for the soaring voices to follow. Its not cheap, but it should be worth it.
Tickets and details: Baroque Masters with Gabrieli Roar - Durham Cathedral
Eclectic and Electric from guitar superstar Sean Shibe
Sean Shibe is a musician who promises the unexpected every time he picks up a guitar – the thought of him pairing up with Maria Włoszczowska and a select crew from the Royal Northern Sinfonia is mouthwatering.
In Hall 2 at the Glasshouse on February 15, we get a programme that moves from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood to big dog (and very accessible) modern composers Cassandra Miller and Thomas Ades.
From the latter we get Shanty – Over The Sea, a short piece sailing by on a woozy, addictive, back-to-front melody over raindrop plucked strings that finally disappears into nothing on the horizon. Before that Miller’s Chanter, the concert’s centrepiece, is a gentle work which may have you drifting off on a Sunday afternoon in the best possible way.
More details and tickets: Chanter with Sean Shibe | The Glasshouse
Three minutes of music make this night at the opera a must
The Royal Northern Sinfonia are performing Dido and Aeneas on Friday, February 20 – so that’s enticing, but what really stopped me in my tracks is three minutes of extra music added to the score.
The March and Canzona for the Funeral of Queen Mary – aka the haunting handful of notes that keeps piercing your ears in current hit TV show Industry, aka the theme music from iconic 70s movie A Clockwork Orange (where it gets synthed to extremes) – is wedged into Purcell’s proto-opera alongside a hamper full of his greatest hits.
Purists look away now – mixing up the tunes like this is a clever, naughty thing to do. And would I spend a night at the opera just for those three minutes? Hell yes, but the rest of the programme is ravishing too.
More details and tickets: Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas | The Glasshouse
Four stars of the future bring a smart choice of tunes to Alnwick
The Fibonacci Quartet seemed destined for big things but for now you can catch these four young players at Alnwick Playhouse as part of the Alnwick Music Society’s well-chosen season. And for this concert on February 22 the draw is not just how the Fibonacci play but what they play.
Beethoven’s very first quartet sets off in the comfy sound world of Haydn but the great man soon carves his own identity from a second movement so beautiful you won’t want it to end and a finale whose muscular main theme could carry a symphony.
That’s followed by Bartok’s fifth quartet from 1934, a piece so brim-full of new ideas its almost impossible to keep up: night music where tiny critters seem to scurry just beyond site, bows bouncing upside-down over strings and hurdy-gurdy interventions.
But clever old Bela makes it one great big mirror where passages of tune reflect each other and recur right through the palindromic five movements: So much so that what’s at first seems earnest and strange will end with you grinning at its familiarity.
Tickets and details: FIBONACCI QUARTET - Alnwick Playhouse
Warning: Arvo Part and Terry Riley at Wylam Brewery – book early or miss out
RNS Moves are taking over Wylam Brewery in Newcastle for what promises to be an unmissable night of minimalist classics on Sunday, March 15. This is your early warning so don’t be foolish and leave it too late to book.
The group is teaming up with the Candoco Dance Ensemble in a concert that ranges from ear-worm Bach across more than 300 years to the very fashionable New Yorker Caroline Shaw.
It will, however, be the minimalism of Part’s much-adored and meditative Spiegel im Spiegel (which Wikipedia tells me has featured in more than 20 films) and Riley’s pounding In C, like the span of some enormous aircraft hanger, which will rightly bring in the crowds.
Details and tickets: Terry Riley’s in C | The Glasshouse
The Cassandra Miller piece sounds like such an inteligent pairing with those Purcell miniatures. That woozy melody idea over plucked strings is a smart compositional choice, kind of like how minimalism learned from early music without copying it outright. I caught a diffrent Miller work last year and it had that same quality of feeling both ancient and totally contemporary at once.