John Eliot Gardiner
The best recordings of my favourite Passion
In the autumn of 1632, a man called Kaspar Schisler returned home to the small Bavarian town of Oberammergau. He…
The rude, ripe tastelessness of John Eliot Gardiner’s Berlioz is the perfect antidote to Haitink’s Instagram Bruckner
Conducting is one of those professions — being monarch is perhaps another — where the less you do, the more…
West Side Story’s flick-knife-to-the-guts thrill never landed its final blow
It was as though Damien Hirst had confessed a secret passion for Victorian watercolours, or Lars von Trier had admitted…
Testosterone and passion: Royal Opera’s Marriage of Figaro reviewed
Another turn around the block for David McVicar’s handsome 1830s Figaro at the Royal Opera — the sixth since the…
The Holy Grail of concert-going: I Fagiolini deliver serious musicianship that never takes itself too seriously
We’ve all read the article. It does the rounds with the dispiriting regularity of an unwanted dish on a sushi…
I don’t get why people worship Bach
I don’t get Johann Sebastian Bach. I mean, I get that he was good — no Mozart, sure, but definitely…
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…
Does the great Bach conductor Masaaki Suzuki think his audience will burn in hell?
Damian Thompson talks to the great Bach conductor — and strict Calvinist — Masaaki Suzuki
As good a treatment of a Bellini opera as we are likely to see: WNO's I puritani reviewed
Bellini belongs to that category of not-quite-great operatic composers whose works are also very difficult to perform adequately, and don’t…
Why are symphony orchestras expected to survive indefinitely?
Watching the Berlin Philharmonic going into conclave to choose a successor to Simon Rattle — after countless hours of secret…
Christopher Hogwood: the absolutist of early music
The death of Christopher Hogwood has deprived the world of the most successful exponent of early music there has ever…
The mean, bullying maestro is extinct – or should be
W.H.Auden once wrote: ‘Real artists are not nice people. All their best feelings go into their work and life has…
