The jury of the German Conducting Award has awarded First prize to the young Peruvian Dayner Tafur-Díaz, 2nd Prize to Nathanaël Iselin and 3rd Prize to Claudio Novati. Dayner Tafur-Díaz is also the winner of the Kurt Masur Audience Award and of the Special Award for the best interpretation of a contemporary work. Born in 1998 in Chimbote (Peru), Dayner Tafur-Díaz won 1st Prize of the International…

The Hallé is delighted to announce that Kahchun Wong will become Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of Manchester’s own symphony orchestra from September 2024. His initial contract will be for five years. Sir Mark Elder, becomes Conductor Emeritus after twenty-four transformative years leaving the Hallé enriched and internationally admired as the orchestra looks ahead with confidence to…

Gustavo Dudamel, the charismatic conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, whose fiery baton and bouncy curls have made him one of classical music’s most recognizable figures, will leave his post in 2026 to become the music director of the New York Philharmonic, both orchestras announced on ...

Concerts in this year’s Berlin Musikfest continue to offer interesting repertoire in works which are virtually unknown outside their composer’s homeland. I must confess that the music of Willem Pijper (1894-1947) is quite unknown to me. Pijper is regarded as the Netherlands’s finest composer of the first half of the twentieth century. Pijper wrote three symphonies, many works for chamber and…

Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic garnered rave reviews for their performances of Antonín Dvořák’s masterful final three symphonies in February 2020. Hailed as “a revelation” by the Los Angeles Times, their interpretations were recorded live at Walt Disney Concert Hall by Deutsche Grammophon for release as a digital album – the follow-up to the artists’ GRAMMY® Award-winning…

The 27-year-old Briton Harry Ogg will be the new Kapellmeister at Deutsche Oper am Rhein from August 2022. Ogg was awarded 3rd prize in the 2020 Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg, received 2nd prize in the 2018 MDR Symphony Orchestra Conducting Competition in Leipzig and was a finalist in the Donatella Flick LSO Conducting Competition at the Barbican in London. He lives in Cologne ...