Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Every crumb of Kurtag’s music is a feast: Endgame, at the Proms, reviewed

9 September 2023 9:00 am

The fun starts early in Beckett’s Endgame. Within minutes of opening his mouth, blind bully Hamm decides to starve his…

A brilliantly cruel Cosi and punkish Petrushka but the Brits disappoint: Festival d’Aix-en-Provence reviewed

26 August 2023 9:00 am

Aix is an odd place. It should be charming, with its dishevelled squares, Busby Berkeley-esque fountains, pretty ochres and pinks.…

In defence of the Arts Council

29 July 2023 11:24 pm

I once knew a monster who said she could not read Proust because there were no figures in Proust with…

The West has much to learn from Hungarian culture

29 July 2023 9:00 am

Hungarian culture is living through a golden age, says Igor Toronyi-Lalic, and the West has much to learn from it

The fine art of French rioting

8 July 2023 9:00 am

Watching the kids and police play hide and seek

Apocalypse chic: Autechre, Last Days and Southbank's Xenakis day reviewed

15 October 2022 9:00 am

It was so dark, my friend noted, you could have had sex or done a Hitler salute. No stage lights,…

Apocalyptic minimalism: Carl Orff's final opera, at Salzburg Festival, reviewed

3 September 2022 9:00 am

‘Germany’s greatest artistic asset, its music, is in danger,’ warned The Spectator in June 1937. Reporting from the leading new-music…

'Oculus Quest is really the way': film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul interviewed

15 January 2022 9:00 am

Igor Toronyi-Lalic talks to the film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul about sleep, Tilda Swinton and VR

Modernism's back, baby: Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival reviewed

11 December 2021 9:00 am

It’s not everyone’s idea of fun, a trip to Huddersfield in the depths of November. But as any veteran of…

A lockdown masterpiece and the Jessica Rabbit of concertos: contemporary classical roundup

25 September 2021 9:00 am

So it finally happened: I experienced my first vocal setting of the word ‘Covid’. An encounter that was, inevitably, more…

Why are the Oscars such a lousy guide to great cinema?

20 March 2021 9:00 am

Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland,predicted to win big at this year’s Oscars, is not a terrible film. It’s a slight, sentimental Grapes…

What's an art form that feels unpopular and pointless, but isn't? Video art

12 December 2020 9:00 am

How did the universe begin? Did the great god Bumba vomit us up, as the Kuba believe? Or did we…

Boxed-up Churchill is a real work of art

13 June 2020 1:32 am

Central London is becoming a paradise for modernists like me. First there was the extraordinary encasement of Big Ben in…

English National Opera's triumphant new production of Harrison Birtwistle's The Mask of Orpheus, directed by Daniel Kramer. [Photo: Alistair Muir]

A triumph: ENO’s Mask of Orpheus reviewed

26 October 2019 9:00 am

ENO’s Mask of Orpheus is a triumph. It’s also unintelligible. Even David Pountney, who produced the original ENO staging in…

The rude, ripe tastelessness of John Eliot Gardiner’s Berlioz is the perfect antidote to Haitink’s Instagram Bruckner

14 September 2019 9:00 am

Conducting is one of those professions — being monarch is perhaps another — where the less you do, the more…

You leave awe-struck but also a bit frazzled: Holland Festival’s Aus Licht reviewed

13 July 2019 9:00 am

In Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI hands become fists, arms and elbows clubs, shoving, pounding and ker-pow-ing the keyboard to near oblivion.…

Sun & Sea (Marina), the Golden Lion-winning opera at the Venice Biennale. Photo: © Andrej Vasilenko

If opera survives, it’ll be thanks to artists and curators, not opera houses

25 May 2019 9:00 am

It was bucketing it down in Venice, yet the beach was heaving. Families, lovebirds, warring kids, a yappy mutt, all…

Keble College chapel, Oxford, designed by William Butterfield, whose churches were an intentionally ugly rebuke to oppressive Georgian architecture

It’s ugliness, not beauty, that spurs us to action

27 April 2019 9:00 am

Timothy Hyde’s Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye is not about why we find things ugly. It’s…

The thrilling first part of Dmitri Tcherniakov's new production of Berlioz's Les Troyens for Opéra Bastille. Photo: Vincent Pontet / Opéra National de Paris

Dau is not just a pretentious fraud – it’s rather disgusting

16 February 2019 9:00 am

The best booers, in my experience, are the Germans. There’s real purpose and thickness to their vocals. Italians hiss. The…

A musical Sarah Kane: composer Rebecca Saunders. Photo: IRCAM Manifeste

The brutish brilliance of Rebecca Saunders

26 January 2019 9:00 am

If you take awards seriously (which of course you shouldn’t) you could argue that Rebecca Saunders is now Britain’s most…

‘One World’ by Mark Wallinger

The winner of the 2018 What’s That Thing? Award for bad public art is…

8 December 2018 9:00 am

Not a bad year for the award. Honourable mentions must go to the landfill abstractions of Oxford’s new Westgate Centre,…

Jozsefs Lendvai and Lendvay with Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra at the Proms. Image: BBC/Chris Christodoulos

The Budapest Festival Orchestra make all other orchestra look routine and oafish

1 September 2018 9:00 am

Looney Tunes was always at its best when soundtracked by a Hungarian gypsy dance. (Watch ‘Pigs in a Polka’ if…

The glums: Marisol Montiel and Ana Luisa Montiel in Taryn Simon’s ‘An Occupation of Loss’

Grief-conjurors, space-mincers and earth-shovellers: performance roundup

19 May 2018 9:00 am

They enter two by two. Grannies, mainly. Headscarved, mainly. Some locking arms. A bit glum. Like rejects from Noah’s ark.…