Classical
Vintage Vick
At the end of Birmingham Opera Company’s RhineGold, as the gods stood ready to enter Valhalla, Donner swung a baseball…
Carry on Bel Canto
Melons. An absolutely cracking pair of melons, right there on a platter: the centrepiece of the banquet that the chaste,…
Howard’s way
There was no printed programme for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s first concert under its music director designate Domingo Hindoyan.…
In search of an ending
There are many Symphonies No. 10 by Gustav Mahler, or none. The situation is rare, if not unique, in the…
Highs and lows
Rejoice: live music is back. Or at least, live music with a live audience, which, as Sir Simon Rattle admitted,…
The neglected, the niche, and the uncool
When this whole mess is over, there’ll be a shortish MA thesis — or at least a blog post —…
Master of the notes
Stepping into the Sistine Chapel, the choir loft is probably the last thing you’d notice. ‘Loft’ is, frankly, a stretch…
Mozart’s footnotes
There are worse fates than posthumous obscurity. When Mozart visited Munich in October 1777, he was initially reluctant to visit…
Where to start with Ethel Smyth
I’m reminded of an old Irish joke. A tourist approaches a local for directions to Dublin. The local, after much…
Alive and kicking
Rachmaninov’s First Symphony begins with a snarl, and gets angrier. A menacing skirl from the woodwinds, a triple-fortissimo blast from…
Tantric opera
I don’t say this lightly, but after 20 years of opera-going, Luigi Rossi’s Il Palazzo incantato might just be the…
Colourisations and scale models
Another week, another online concert; and since orchestral music seems likely to be confined to screens and stereos for a…
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…
Brendel the Dadaist
How many people are celebrating the fact that, last week, one of Europe’s most inspired writers about music, modern art…
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.…
The pleasures of four-play
One of the few social activities not yet prohibited under lockdown laws is four-handed piano playing. I don’t mean sitting…
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…
Drama vs display
It is amazing what fine performances you can get beamed to your computer these days. Slightly less amazing is the…
Power play
Praising the grand old maestri of the podium isn’t a good look, as they say on Twitter. Conductors such as…
Trick or treat
The timing couldn’t be better. Just as the gates clang shut on another national lockdown, trapping us all indefinitely with…
Panto at Glyndebourne
Offenbach at Glyndebourne! Short of Die Soldaten with a picnic break or a period-instrument revival of Jerry Springer: The Opera,…
Fish and fire
Anyone who invited the Russian composer Mily Balakirev to dinner had to be jolly careful about the fish they served.…
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…
