Music
Twin peaks
Schoenberg began Gurrelieder in 1900, but he didn’t hear it until 1913. By then, he’d moved on, and he ostentatiously…
Wilson’s sparkle and snap
Back in the period-instrument wars of the 1980s and ’90s, when the forces of historically informed performance smashed out of…
Time to end authenticity
They say the first step towards recovery is admitting that you have a problem. So I’m staging an intervention and…
Who is Kirill Petrenko?
Two summers ago, the BBC were offered a Proms visit by the Bavarian State Orchestra with its music director, Kirill…
Losing our religion
Sir James MacMillan’s European Requiem, performed at the Proms on Sunday, isn’t about Brexit. The composer had to make this…
Hadyn recreated
‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!’ wrote Elgar, quoting Shelley, at the top of his Second Symphony. He should…
Back to the future
As Kraftwerk took their 3D show around Britain last week, a document from 2013 surfaced online, purporting to be their…
His Master’s Feet
Gerald Barry once licked Beethoven’s carpet. At least, that’s what he told me, and I’m as sure as any interviewer…
Detroit spinner
When techno first appeared amid the urban wasteland of mid-1980s Detroit, its futuristic sound palette was inspired by the whirring…
White-knuckle ride
Playing in an orchestra that disintegrates mid-concert is not an experience you forget. One moment everything’s motoring along nicely. Suddenly…
Glamming it up
Late on the Friday afternoon of The Great Escape — the annual three-day event for which the London music industry…
The rise of toytown pop
Pop’s counterfactuals tend to be built on questioning mortality: what if Jimi Hendrix had lived? Or Buddy Holly? Rarely does…
Around the horn
The concert began with a flourish and a honk. Well, of course it did. Telemann wrote his last Ouverture-Suite in…
Period drama
Harpsichordists are supposed to make love, not war: Sir Thomas Beecham famously compared the sound they make to ‘two skeletons…
Bingeing on Bach
Coined in 1944, ‘completism’ is a modern term for a modern-day obsession. What began as a phenomenon of possession —…
Secrets and spies
Spare a thought for Emil Gilels, still revered today by Russians as the foremost pianist of the Soviet era. The…
Beyond comprehension
The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s ‘Belief and Beyond Belief’ season is drawing to a close, without making it in any degree…
Mission impossible?
Just before Peter Donohoe played the last of Alexander Scriabin’s ten piano sonatas at the Guildhall’s Milton Court on Sunday,…
Passion indeed
‘The dripping blood our only drink/ The bloody flesh our only food…/ Again, in spite of that, we call this…
The decade the music died
For much of the past half-century, London has been the world’s orchestral capital. Not always in quality, but numerically without…
Rued awakening
It’s always promising when the orchestra won’t fit on the stage. For the UK première, some 97 years after it…
All’s well that ends well
There’s a moment in the finale of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata when the frenzied piano writing turns unexpectedly jolly. The late…
Sound storms
Nothing pleased Iannis Xenakis more than a great big rattling storm. The sound of a thunderclap would have him running…
Sound storms
Nothing pleased Iannis Xenakis more than a great big rattling storm. The sound of a thunderclap would have him running…
Sound storms
Nothing pleased Iannis Xenakis more than a great big rattling storm. The sound of a thunderclap would have him running…
