A spring mood lifter: Tales of Love and Loss at the Linbury Theatre reviewed
This year’s Jette Parker Artists showcase is a triple bill of modern-ish operas; a cleverly assembled trittico of one-acters, linked…
Is this the missing link between Bach and Haydn?
Grade: B ‘Is that Haydn or Mozart? One can’t always be sure,’ remarks Kenneth Clark in the 18th-century episode of…
The artistic collapse of Welsh National Opera
On the first night of Welsh National Opera’s new Flying Dutchman, the company’s co-directors walked on stage to salute their…
Heart-melting loveliness from John Rutter
Anyone for a spot of acoustic science? Apparently the distinctive colour of a musical note is concentrated almost wholly in…
An outstanding Turn of the Screw
Never let it be said that The Spectator fails to follow up an arts story. Long-term readers will recall that…
Royal Opera’s Siegfried is magnificent
Covent Garden’s new Ring cycle has reached Siegfried, and once again, you can only marvel at Wagner’s Shakespeare-like ability to…
Why the Goldberg Variations fill me with dread
Is Sir Andras Schiff becoming the Ken Dodd of the piano? In his later years, you’ll recall, the Yorick of…
Meet the world’s finest string quartet
Once upon a time in communist Hungary – 1975, in fact – four students at the Liszt Academy decided to…
Recordings have stunted us
Bring me my bow of burning gold; or failing that, the opening notes of Elgar’s Second Symphony. That’s how I’ve…
‘I didn’t expect to love Wagner’
By the end of Siegfried, the third opera in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the king of the gods is…
A playful, big-hearted, intelligent new opera
Some people like art to have a message. So here’s one, delivered by Katsushika Hokusai near the end of Dai…
What a masterpiece. What a man: Borodin at the Barbican reviewed
Gianandrea Noseda conducted the London Symphony Orchestra last week in a programme of Stravinsky, Chopin and Borodin. The Stravinsky was…
The early-music movement is ageing well
The early music movement: it’s grown up so quickly, hasn’t it? The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is 40…
Richard Jones’s Boris Godunov feels like a parody
Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov is back at Covent Garden, and there are ninjas. This isn’t a spoiler. There hasn’t been a…
Seductive Debussy and Ravel from the RLPO
Grade: A It’s a cliché that the best Spanish music was written by Frenchmen but it’s mostly true nonetheless, and…
Rattle’s glorious Janacek
The Czech author Karel Capek is probably best known for his plays: high-concept speculative dramas such as R.U.R. and The…
This Royal Opera Traviata is no ordinary revival
First opera of the year, first night back in London, and the jolly old metrop was already springing surprises. A…
The art of the transatlantic liner
Some time in the next few weeks, a great ocean liner will be lost at sea. One of the greatest,…
The magnificence of Beare’s Chamber Music Festival
The quartet is the basic unit of string chamber music. Two violins, a viola and a cello: subtract any one…
An opera that will actually make you laugh
‘What we want is proper comedy!’ bellows the male chorus in the opening seconds of Prokofiev’s L’amour des trois oranges…
The joy of composers’ graves
I called on Hugo Wolf the other week, and he didn’t look too great. He wouldn’t, of course; he died…
Intoxicating Elgar from the London Phil
By all accounts, the world première of Elgar’s Sea Pictures at the October 1899 Norwich Festival made quite a splash.…
Evgeny Kissin’s stand-in brings the house down
It was such an enticing programme, too. The Philharmonia had booked Evgeny Kissin, the last great piano prodigy of the…
