Rebecca Franks

From Beethoven to the Beatles, Tchaikovsky to Charli XCX, these are the inventions that changed music.

Rebecca Franks visits a city that despite economic hardships, welcomes the cream of the classical world to its festival and competition

The annual Yorkshire festival explores the outer reaches and boundaries of the art song tradition. But a night with Roderick Williams eclipsed its odd new commission

The musician once dubbed ‘the hottest composer on the planet’ is inaugurating Oxford’s £185m centre for humanities — and fighting against the march of Stem

The pianist’s poetry and artistry were first class in a recital of Schubert and Chopin at the Barbican, London, showing why he won the International Chopin Competition

The London Philharmonic Orchestra, a strong cast and the conductor Edward Gardner delivered an extraordinary Royal Festival Hall performance of Berg’s shocking 1925 opera

Birmingham Opera Company promised to ‘reconnect me with reality’ with six new 15-minute works. It also involved a coconut shy and an ode to a legendary nightclub

Elena Langer’s Four Sisters is the stand-out in this triple bill of operas by women, performed in the Linbury at the Royal Opera House

English National Opera’s first new production created in Manchester is a traumatic modern fable with a dizzyingly full-on staging by Kip Williams

Marking 250 years of the United States, the Barbican hosted the premiere of this 90-minute exploration of the horrors meted out against the country’s indigenous people