Booster shots of sunlight
Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra began the year with a world première. Unsuk Chin’s Second Violin Concerto…
Business as usual
It’s 2022 and classical music is, again, dead. It’d be surprising if it wasn’t. In 2014 the New Yorker published…
From Russia with love
The enduring appeal of The Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky’s ravishing score is nothing less than the sound of Christmas
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Grade: B It must have been an interesting day in the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s press office when Blair Tindall’s memoir…
Liquid silk
That strain again… it’s the morning after the concert and one tune is still there, playing in the head upon…
Sublime – and ridiculous
It’s the final scene of The Valkyrie and Wotan is wearing cords. They’re a sensible choice for a hard-working deity:…
Whistling the scenery
With Glyndebourne’s The Rake’s Progress, the show starts with David Hockney’s front cloth. The colour, the ingenuity, the visual bravura:…
Showtime
Until 1881, HMS Pinafore was the second-longest-running show in West End history. Within a year of its première it had…
Satisfaction guaranteed
‘Drammatico’, wrote César Franck over the opening of his Piano Quintet, and you’d better believe he meant it. The score…
Small but perfectly formed
Haydn is looking well — in fact, he’s positively glowing. The dignified pose; the modest, intelligent smile: it’s only when…
Stepmother superior
Leos Janacek cared about words. He’d hang about central Brno, notebook in hand, eavesdropping on conversations and trying to capture…
Such sweet sorrow
‘It’s generally agreed that in contemporary practice, this opera proposes significant ethical and cultural problems,’ says the director Lindy Hume…
Revival of the fittest
In Oliver Mears’s new production of Verdi’s Rigoletto, the curtain rises on a work of art. The stage is in…
Teenage kicks
For a one-hit composer, we hear rather a lot of Pietro Mascagni. His reputation rests on his 1890 debut Cavalleria…
Divine comedy
Arthur Sullivan knew better than to mess with a winning formula. ‘Cox and Box, based on J. Maddison Morton’s farce…
Melodic genius and trainspotter
For some reason, I’d got it into my head that the main work in the Gringolts Quartet’s midday recital at…
The human condition
Opera buffs enjoy their jargon. We all do it, scattering words like ‘spinto’ and ‘Fach’ like an enthusiastic pizza waiter…
Grateful for large mercies
Glyndebourne is nothing if not honest. ‘In response to the ongoing Covid-19 restrictions our 2021 performances of Tristan und Isolde…
Vintage Vick
At the end of Birmingham Opera Company’s RhineGold, as the gods stood ready to enter Valhalla, Donner swung a baseball…
Springtime for Putin
Alexander Litvinenko lies in a London hospital, dying of polonium poisoning. That photograph from 2006 haunts the memory: the medical…
Money, money – and music
Art is supposed to emerge from poverty but extreme wealth does not preclude talent, as the history of composers proves. By Richard Bratby
Too bawdy for the Beeb
Malcolm Arnold composed his opera The Dancing Master in 1952 for BBC television. It never appeared, the problem being the…
Carry on Bel Canto
Melons. An absolutely cracking pair of melons, right there on a platter: the centrepiece of the banquet that the chaste,…
Tsar quality
There are worse inconveniences than having to wear a face mask to the opera. But there’s one consequence that hadn’t…
Howard’s way
There was no printed programme for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s first concert under its music director designate Domingo Hindoyan.…
