Ravel
The miracle of watching a great string quartet perform
Joseph Haydn, it’s generally agreed, invented the string quartet. And having done so, he re-invented it: again and again. Take…
A coherent evening of real opera: GSMD's Triple Bill reviewed
Covid has been many things to the arts — most of them unprintable. A plague, a scourge, a disaster from…
The best recordings of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges
‘I don’t want to do my work. I want to go for a walk. I want to eat all the…
Drunk singers, Ravel on film and prime Viennese operetta: the addictive joys of classical YouTube
The full addictive potential of classical YouTube needs to be experienced to be understood. And let’s be honest, there are…
A Beggar’s Opera that beggars belief in Edinburgh
Robert Carsen’s new updating of The Beggar’s Opera is a coke-snorting, trash-talking, breakdancing, palm-greasing, skirt-hiking, rule-breaking affair — and every…
Speed limit
Slow radio is popping up everywhere at the moment — programmes that have no outward form but just meander through…
Small wonders
It has been a reasonably good week for peripatetic opera-loving female-underwear fetishists. In La bohème at Covent Garden Musetta slipped…
The greatest British opera after Dido and Grimes? Vaughan Williams’s Riders to the Sea
In a remote fishing village a lone figure confronts an unexplained death, standing tormented but unbroken against fate, the community…
Glyndebourne’s Ravel double bill comes close to perfection
When I saw the first performance of this production of Ravel’s two operas at Glyndebourne three years ago, I thought…
