2025-26 Concert Reviews

Once I had a rather dyspeptic acquaintance who regularly wrote into Radio 3 to complain about all “all the modern rubbish” they insisted on playing. By that he meant, music written since March 26, 1827, the day that Beethoven died. Alas he, like Beethoven, has long since moved on to his reward, which includes, we can only hope, a repertoire more to his liking. I thought of him on Friday night because that celestial playlist – again so we hope and perhaps believe – may resemble the programme lavished on us by Ex Cathedra in the Shropshire Music Trust’s final concert of its season.

Active engagement with the arts helps us live longer, research suggested this week. Listening to live music strengthens the sinews just as much as a weekly workout apparently. So this performance [on 8th May 2026] by the Carducci Quartet proved a delightful way to swerve the dumbells and stave off the final whistle just by sitting in St Alkmund’s awash in spring sunshine.

The Budapest Café Orchestra are neither from Budapest, nor an orchestra nor attached to any kind of café. What they are, however, is something else, and when I say something else I mean they really are something else.

These guys held the sell-out crowd sweltering under Prestfelde’s hot tin roof in the palm of their cool, ministering hands. They swirled up the temperatures even higher with a combination of electric musicality, and heft and twang. They’re real heat artists, conjuring the mercury ever higher with the kind of on-stage pyrotechnics, musically speaking, that should come with a health warning in a ring-bound folder of sensible colour and a whole inch thick. It really was something else. Crazy and barely contained.

The Carducci Quartet made a welcome return to Shrewsbury on Friday with a thrilling programme of musical and intellectual power. But not just this. Operatic Mozart, searing minimalism of Glass and a scintillating rendition of one of Shostakovich’s war quartets gave this fantastic foursome much to revel in – and the packed-out Maidment auditorium much to enjoy.