Lieder
A spirited attempt to fix a show that’s never really flown: Utopia, Limited reviewed
Utopia, Limited (1893) is a rare bird, and one that every Gilbert and Sullivan completist simply has to bag. The…
The audience were in tears: Christian Gerhaher/Gerold Huber at the Wigmore Hall reviewed
‘Popular’ classical music is a relative term. Show me someone who thinks Beethoven is surefire box office, and I’ll show……
From Brexit to Beethoven: John Humphrys returns to radio
Some listeners will have had quite a shock first thing on Monday. Turning on at six to Classic FM they…
A Winterreise that included a mistake of genius
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of approach to performing Schubert’s Winterreise, though sometimes there’s doubt or dispute about which…
Partying like it’s 1899: two lieder recitals reviewed
If a symphony is, as Mahler famously put it, ‘like the world’, then songs and lieder are like seeing that…
Salon Strauss
An opera without singers, a Strauss orchestra of just 16, and an early music ensemble playing Mahler: welcome to the…
The Heckler: my decades-long campaign against Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
For anyone who has been interested in classical vocal music since the middle of the last century, whether choral, operatic…
