From screen to stage
It’s my new lockdown ritual. Switch on the telly, cue up the menu and scroll down to where the vintage…
From bad joke to 21st-century classic
Erich Korngold was what you might call an early adopter. As a child prodigy in Habsburg Vienna, he’d astonished the…
Holy maximalism
The two most depressing words in contemporary classical music? That’s easy: holy minimalism. I know, I know. Lots of people…
A pan-European cheese dream
The best moment in the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Day Concert comes after the end of the advertised programme.…
Ambassador, you are really spoiling us
In classical music circles, Christmas arrives with the overture to Handel’s Messiah. Or so they’ll tell you. In truth, festivities…
Recorded delivery
For an orchestra to lose one anniversary concert may be regarded as unfortunate. To lose two? Welcome to 2020. The…
About Schmidt
The sounds that Franz Schmidt made while learning the trumpet were pretty much unbearable, or so the story goes. In…
Respighi’s Roman Trilogy: Sinfonia of London/ John Wilson
Grade: A The strings rear up, there’s a flash of steel from the trumpets, and ten seconds into Respighi’s Feste…
Born of the moment
It’s quite a title sequence. Puccini swells on the soundtrack and words flash before your eyes. ‘Ecstatic!’ ‘Spellbound!’ ‘Passionate!’ ‘Dazzled!’…
Panto at Glyndebourne
Offenbach at Glyndebourne! Short of Die Soldaten with a picnic break or a period-instrument revival of Jerry Springer: The Opera,…
One for the road
The email from English National Opera was blunt: ‘Your arrival time is 18.25. If you arrive outside your allocated time…
Class acts
The Last Night of the Proms came and went, and it was pretty much as anyone might have predicted, if…
Going solo
Our college choirmaster had a trick that he liked to deploy when he sensed that we were phoning it in.…
Barely touching the void
The Royal Albert Hall, as Douglas Adams never wrote, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely,…
Parallel universe
There wasn’t going to be a Lucerne Festival this year. The annual month-long squillion-dollar international beano got cancelled, along with…
The joy of going to a real concert…
I went to a concert! Not a livestream or download: a real concert, with real musicians, a real conductor, a…
‘Where I grew up, classical music was diversity’
Richard Bratby talks to Birmingham Opera Company’s new music director Alpesh Chauhan about his Brummie roots, Bruckner and how his BAME heritage is a non-story
Method in the madness
First there were the home recitals: musicians playing solo Bach in front of their bookshelves, wonkily captured on iPhones. Next…
The miniaturists
Model villages deliver a cheerful jolt to unexamined notions about our own place – and size – in the world, says Richard Bratby
Scouse style
Richard Bratby on Britain’s oldest and ballsiest orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, which has taken on everyone from gang leaders to Derek Hatton
Live and let die
Remember when 2020 was going to be Beethoven year? There were going to be cycles and festivals, recordings and reappraisals;…
From joy to dissolution
At the start of Elgar’s Second Symphony the full orchestra hovers, poised. It pulls back; and then, like a dam…
Surfer’s paradise
The full addictive potential of classical YouTube needs to be experienced to be understood. And let’s be honest, there are…
The Met goes Eurovision
Desperate times call for desperate measures. With the world’s opera houses currently dark, the New York Metropolitan Opera tackled the…
On the contrary
The Spectator arts and books pages have spent 10,000 issues identifying the dominant cultural phenomena of the day and being difficult about them, says Richard Bratby
