Roberta Alexander’s outstanding CD of vocal music by Samuel Barber demonstrates the soprano’s understanding of the composer’s musical language and emotional content … The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic plays very well under the tasteful leadership of Edo de Waart.

How is it that music that is so precise and obviously well organised can at the same time move with unforced, almost improvisational fluidity? And how can it be that atonal music sounds so natural and accessible? It's because De Raaff's music is nature itself; geometrically and architecturally stylised music it may be, but no different to the way a tree puts out its branches or how a leaf forms its veins. No different to the cosmologic nature of constellations, wave patterns on water, the pictorial architecture of a murmuration of starlings or a shoal of fish. In De Raaff's work calculation and spontaneity merge into a single, monumental but never massive whole.

It is impossible to perform either Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D or his Double Concerto in A minor without inviting comparison to Joseph Joachim, the great Hungarian virtuoso for whom Brahms composed nearly all of his violin works. For many years, Joachim and Brahms were inseparable companions and mutual sources of inspiration. It was on Joachim’s urging that Brahms composed his Violin Concerto in D, a masterpiece which quickly entered the standard violin repertoire.
Violin Concerto in D was notable at the time for its return to a style of symphonic concerto which could be traced directly to Ludwig van Beethoven. This gives both conductor and orchestra a great deal of leeway for interpretation, especially during the long periods in which the solo violin doesn’t play at all, such as the orchestral introduction and the beginning of the Adagio movement.

Les vêpres siciliennes, like the similarly epic Don Carlos, was conceived as a grand opéra for Paris and is driven by the tensions between private passions and public politics. Originally set during Sicily's 13th-century uprising against French rule, in Christof Loy's staging for the Netherlands Opera the action is transposed to a 1940s world of sudden violence and shadowy double-dealing. Imaginatively cast and idiomatically conducted, the performance presents this magnificent score in its entirety, including the allegorical ballet The Four Seasons.