Classical music
Apocalypse chic: Autechre, Last Days and Southbank's Xenakis day reviewed
It was so dark, my friend noted, you could have had sex or done a Hitler salute. No stage lights,…
Grey, grey and more grey: Aida, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed
Grey. More grey. So very, very grey. That’s the main visual impression left by Robert Carsen’s new production of Verdi’s…
Holds out huge promise for future seasons: If Opera's La Rondine reviewed
One swallow might not make a summer, but it certainly helps rounds the season off. ‘Perhaps, like the swallow, you…
The joy of Franck’s Symphony in D Minor: BBCSO/Gabel, at the Proms, reviewed
In the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes, a Broadway hoofer is forced to work at a community college,…
Apocalyptic minimalism: Carl Orff's final opera, at Salzburg Festival, reviewed
‘Germany’s greatest artistic asset, its music, is in danger,’ warned The Spectator in June 1937. Reporting from the leading new-music…
Why is the post-colonial guilt only applied to Western classical traditions? Radio 3's World of Classical reviewed
The blurb accompanying the Radio 3 series World of Classical, inviting us to ‘join the dots between classical music traditions…
A bleeding, inch-thick hunk of verismo sirloin: Royal Opera's Cav and Pag reviewed
One legacy of lockdown in the classical music world has been the sheer length of the 21-22 season. In a…
An intimate, lucid and unforgettable new James MacMillan work
On Tuesday night I was at the world première of a motet by Sir James MacMillan and I don’t think…
Claude Vivier ought to be a modern classic. Why isn't he?
April is the cruellest month, but May is shaping up quite pleasantly and the daylight streamed in through the east…
Even Nelsons’s miscalculations are fascinating: Leipzig Gewandhaus/Andris Nelsons, at the Barbican, reviewed
Imagine growing up with a whole orchestra as your plaything. Richard Strauss’s father was the principal horn of the Munich…
Too affectionate, not enough cruelty: Don Pasquale, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed
There are many things to enjoy in the Royal Opera’s revival of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, but perhaps the most surprising…
Why I booed Birtwistle
Keith Burstein recalls a key moment in the battle for emancipation from the ivory tower of atonalism
Igor Levit deserved his standing ovation; Shostakovich, even more so
Music and politics don’t mix, runs the platitude. Looks a bit tattered now, doesn’t it? For Soviet musicians, of course,…
Pitch-black satire drenched in an atmosphere of compelling unease: ETO's Golden Cockerel reviewed
Blame it on Serge Diaghilev. Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908 and never saw the première of his last opera, The Golden…
Astonishing, if unnecessary, grandstanding: Barbara Hannigan's La voix humaine reviewed
I think it was when she leaned forward and balanced on one leg that Barbara Hannigan jumped the shark. It…
The genius of Iannis Xenakis
This year is the centenary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis, the Greek composer-architect who called himself an ancient Greek…
Deserves to become an ENO staple: The Cunning Little Vixen reviewed
Spoiler alert. The last words in Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen come from a child playing a frog. The story…
Ralph Vaughan Williams: modernist master
He is caricatured as a populist and purveyor of ‘folky-wolky’ melodies, says Richard Bratby, but Vaughan Williams was a modernist master of uncompromising originality
Not pleasant, and not in tune, but unarguably compelling: Royal Opera's Nabucco reviewed
Nabucco, said Giuseppe Verdi, ‘was born under a lucky star’. It was both his last throw of the dice and…
A booster shot of sunlight: Unsuk Chin's new violin concerto reviewed
Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra began the year with a world première. Unsuk Chin’s Second Violin Concerto…
The genius of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker score
The enduring appeal of The Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky’s ravishing score is nothing less than the sound of Christmas
Reprehensible – but fun: Orpheus Chamber Orchestra's Complete DG Recordings reviewed
Grade: B It must have been an interesting day in the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s press office when Blair Tindall’s memoir…
In defence of the earworm
That strain again… it’s the morning after the concert and one tune is still there, playing in the head upon…
Hockney’s Rake’s Progress remains one of the supreme achievements
With Glyndebourne’s The Rake’s Progress, the show starts with David Hockney’s front cloth. The colour, the ingenuity, the visual bravura:…
Very much NSFW: Jean-Efflam Bavouzet/Quatuor Danel at Wigmore Hall reviewed
‘Drammatico’, wrote César Franck over the opening of his Piano Quintet, and you’d better believe he meant it. The score…
