Classical music
Vivid, noble and bouyant: AAM’s Messiah reviewed
More than a thousand musicians took part when Handel’s Messiah was performed in Westminster Abbey in May 1791. It wasn’t…
Radio 3 Unwind is music for the morgue
Soon after the launch of Classic FM in 1992, the then controller of Radio 3, Nicholas Kenyon, asserted that his…
Why is Fauré not more celebrated?
It is 100 years since the death of Gabriel Fauré, a composer whose spellbinding romantic tunes emerge from harmonies and…
A lively and imaginative interpretation of an indestructible Britten opera
Scottish Opera’s new production of Albert Herring updates the action to 1990, and hey – remember 1990? No, not particularly,…
Schoenberg owes his survival to crime drama
George Gershwin once made a home movie of Arnold Schoenberg grinning in a suit on his tennis court in Beverly…
Heartfelt and thought-provoking: Eugene Onegin, at the Royal Opera, reviewed
The curtain is already up at the start of Ted Huffman’s new production of Eugene Onegin. The auditorium is lit…
‘Some pianists make me shake with anger’: Vikingur Olafsson interviewed
At the BBC Proms this year, an Icelandic pianist dressed like a Wall Street broker played a slow movement from…
A box set for those on the spectrum: Markus Poschner’s Bruckner Symphonies reviewed
Grade: B+ Anton Bruckner wrote 11 symphonies – Numbers One to Nine plus a student exercise and the formidable rejected…
Manacorda’s thrills and spills at Prom 72
At a Hollywood party in the 1940s, the garrulous socialite Elsa Maxwell spotted Arnold Schoenberg, then teaching music at UCLA,…
A lively showcase for a great central European orchestra at the Proms
As the Proms season enters the home straight, it’s moved up a gear, with a string of high profile European…
The unstoppable rise of stage amplification
Recent acquisition of some insanely expensive hearing aids aimed at helping me out in cacophonous restaurants has set me thinking…
The Stockhausen work that is worth braving
Grade: A- One of the best one-liners attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham refers to the stridently avant-garde Karlheinz Stockhausen: ‘I’ve…
In defence of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Grand Duke
Artistic partnerships are elusive things. The best – where two creative personalities somehow inspire or goad each other to do…
Children have the Proms. Grown-ups head to Salzburg. Snob summer
Salzburg Festival doesn’t mess about. The offerings this year include an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain in Lithuanian, a…
Forget the Proms and Edinburgh – the Three Choirs Festival is where it’s at
The Proms have started but there is a world elsewhere, and in Worcester Cathedral the 296th Three Choirs Festival set…
An ensemble achievement that dances and sparkles: Glyndebourne’s Giulio Cesare reviewed
A classic opera production ages like wine. When David McVicar’s staging of Handel’s Giulio Cesare first opened at Glyndebourne in…
When Fauré played The Spectator
Gabriel Fauré composed his song cycle La bonne chanson in 1894 for piano and voice. But he added string parts…
Bristol’s new concert hall is extremely fine
Bristol has a new concert hall, and it’s rather good. The transformation of the old Colston Hall into the Bristol…
Meet the man who says improvisation is the key to Mozart
In August 1993, the pianist Robert Levin sat down in Walthamstow Assembly Rooms with the conductor Christopher Hogwood and the…
Across Britain punters are lapping up ultra-trad opera – the Arts Council will be disgusted
Another week at the opera, another evening with an elitist and ethically dubious art form. I love it; you love…
