25 June 1825: 13-year-old Franz Liszt wows a concert audience in Manchester, performing his New Grand Overture for the first time.
20 May 1856: One of the great concert pianists of the era, Clara Schumann ‘has a musical genius of the highest order’.
11 March 1876: Verdi’s Requiem is given a fine performance by Mr Hallé and his orchestra.
25 November 1892: Dvorăk’s latest concerto is pioneering work.
18 May 1906: Despite his slight physique Edvard Grieg, performing in London, has ‘an extremely beautiful poetry of his own’.
3 December 1919: Elgar’s cello concerto was poorly performed and reviewed, but it deserves respect.
5 May 1920: Stravinsky fails to impress the Guardian’s critic, who says Ragtime is ‘hardly worth the while of a man of original genius’.
4 August 1924: Beethoven spent his summer days in Baden, composing the Ninth Symphony (and exasperating his landlord).
4 October 1932: Bach’s ‘last staggering act’, The Art of Fugue, receives its first performance in England.
31 May 1962: The newly opened Coventry cathedral hosts the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s anti-war War Requiem.
12 January 1970: Stockhausen is so experimental he risks leaving the audience behind.
17 June 1972: The worlds of classical and jazz collide in a collaboration between violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Stéphane Grappelli.
10 February 1989: Cellist Yo-Yo Ma plays Jacqueline du Pré’s Stradivarius – ‘the only instrument I have ever played which has a soul’ – at the Barbican.
18 March 2016: Gustavo Dudamel, rock star conductor of the LA Philharmonic, on bringing classical music to the 99%.
