A month in Classics: January 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
Messiaen on the Mighty Durham Cathedral Organ
People seem more interested than ever in the devout French 20th century composer Olivier Messiaen. Perhaps we’re a bit more relaxed about the religious themes at the heart of his work than we were in his lifetime.
And that’s a good thing because Messiaen carries a unique punch. His music is at once intense and statuesque - although the kind of statue on which tiny songbirds sometimes perch to sing – and unlike anyone else.
Organist Daniel cook performs Messiaen’s mighty hour-long La Nativité du Seigneur on the equally mighty organ at Durham Cathedral on Wednesday, January 14. The nine sections inspired by the birth of Jesus are interspersed with readings from scripture. The evening promises to be a unique and spiritual event, and entrance is wonderfully free. Details here.
Adventures in sound with composer James Weeks
If your new year resolution is to explore new sound worlds then look no further than the Glasshouse on Saturday, January 17. North East Composer James Weeks will be leading Royal Northern Sinfonia players through a concert of seven works by 20th Century and modern composers loosely connected by their focus on our environment.
As well as the noise the players themselves generate Annea Lockwood’s Dusk and David de la Haye’s Tyne Hydrophones incorporate found sounds from above and below water.
Kicking off the concert in Hall Two will be Weeks’ own Hyetophony, a piece even Google can’t help me tell you anything about. I do know Michael Finissy’s constantly tumbling Second Piano Concerto and packaged alongside by John Cage and John Luther Adams this makes for a fascinating evening. Full details and tickets here.
Merry Pranks Played in Wooler, Durham and Gateshead
The Royal Northern Sinfonia are on the road in January with a concert billed as Beethoven’s Septet… but I think the great grumbly old man may find himself upstaged by two pranksters this time round.
The first half, after all, features Haydn’s ‘Joke’ String Quartet with its notorious hidden, delayed, pause, ‘no, it still not quite finished yet’ ending (trust me, you won’t want to be the first in the room to applaud!). And then there is Richard Strauss’ tone poem Till Eulenspiegel’s Einmal Anders brining to life a practical joker from German folklore.
Normally Eulenspiegel would need a giant orchestra and a giant stage – but with this chamber music reduction you get to hear one of romantic music’s great earworms in your choice of Wooler, Durham or the smaller Hall Two at the Glasshouse, between January 23-25.
Full list of venues and dates here.
You had me at Angela Hewitt and the word Bach
It will always be an event when the pianist Angela Hewitt comes to town with a solo concert of works by JS Bach. Her performance of the complete Well Tempered Klavier remains one of the great nights at The Sage (now Glasshouse) even more than a decade on.
On February 1 she arrives with a mixed programme, a kind of European tour featuring an Italian Concerto, a French Suite and an undeniably Germanic Prelude and Fugue.
Can one woman and a piano fill Hall One? You bet she can.
Tickets and details here.
Big Orchestra, Big Noise … Big Tunes
A week after Angela Hewitt’s solo turn we get the opposite at the Glasshouse Hall One – the vast resources of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under star conductor Vasily Petrenko.
Soloist Tom Borrow gets to hammer our the big tune that launches Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto – the epitome of swashbuckling 19th century grandeur – before the swooning beauty of the slow movement takes over.
The February 8 concert opens with a lesser known Russian, the late Romantic tone poem Kikimora by Anatoly Lyadov (think Rimsky-Korsakov or Mussorgsky) and climaxes with the best known and noisiest of Shostakovich symphonies, his Tenth.
Tickets and details here.