Classical music

Opera North’s Flying Dutchman scores a full house in cliché bingo

8 February 2025 9:00 am

The overture to The Flying Dutchman opens at gale force. There’s nothing like it; Mendelssohn and Berlioz both painted orchestral…

The thankless art of the librettist

8 February 2025 9:00 am

Next week, after the première of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera Festen, the cast and conductor will take their bow. All…

Classical music has much to learn from Liverpool

1 February 2025 9:00 am

They do things their own way in Liverpool; they always have. In 1997 the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra launched a…

The stupidity of the classical piano trio

18 January 2025 9:00 am

It’s a right mess, the classical piano trio; the unintended consequence of one of musical history’s more frustrating twists. When…

Our verdict on Pappano’s first months at the London Symphony Orchestra

4 January 2025 9:00 am

Sir Antonio Pappano began 2024 as music director of the Royal Opera and ended as chief conductor of the London…

Vivid, noble and bouyant: AAM’s Messiah reviewed

14 December 2024 9:00 am

More than a thousand musicians took part when Handel’s Messiah was performed in Westminster Abbey in May 1791. It wasn’t…

Radio 3 Unwind is music for the morgue

30 November 2024 9:00 am

Soon after the launch of Classic FM in 1992, the then controller of Radio 3, Nicholas Kenyon, asserted that his…

Why is Fauré not more celebrated?

23 November 2024 9:00 am

It is 100 years since the death of Gabriel Fauré, a composer whose spellbinding romantic tunes emerge from harmonies and…

A lively and imaginative interpretation of an indestructible Britten opera

2 November 2024 9:00 am

Scottish Opera’s new production of Albert Herring updates the action to 1990, and hey – remember 1990? No, not particularly,…

Schoenberg owes his survival to crime drama

26 October 2024 9:00 am

George Gershwin once made a home movie of Arnold Schoenberg grinning in a suit on his tennis court in Beverly…

Heartfelt and thought-provoking: Eugene Onegin, at the Royal Opera, reviewed

5 October 2024 9:00 am

The curtain is already up at the start of Ted Huffman’s new production of Eugene Onegin. The auditorium is lit…

‘Some pianists make me shake with anger’: Vikingur Olafsson interviewed

5 October 2024 9:00 am

At the BBC Proms this year, an Icelandic pianist dressed like a Wall Street broker played a slow movement from…

A box set for those on the spectrum: Markus Poschner’s Bruckner Symphonies reviewed

28 September 2024 9:00 am

Grade: B+ Anton Bruckner wrote 11 symphonies – Numbers One to Nine plus a student exercise and the formidable rejected…

Manacorda’s thrills and spills at Prom 72

21 September 2024 9:00 am

At a Hollywood party in the 1940s, the garrulous socialite Elsa Maxwell spotted Arnold Schoenberg, then teaching music at UCLA,…

A lively showcase for a great central European orchestra at the Proms

7 September 2024 9:00 am

As the Proms season enters the home straight, it’s moved up a gear, with a string of high profile European…

The unstoppable rise of stage amplification

31 August 2024 9:00 am

Recent acquisition of some insanely expensive hearing aids aimed at helping me out in cacophonous restaurants has set me thinking…

The Stockhausen work that is worth braving

31 August 2024 9:00 am

Grade: A- One of the best one-liners attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham refers to the stridently avant-garde Karlheinz Stockhausen: ‘I’ve…

In defence of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Grand Duke

17 August 2024 9:00 am

Artistic partnerships are elusive things. The best – where two creative personalities somehow inspire or goad each other to do…

Children have the Proms. Grown-ups head to Salzburg. Snob summer

10 August 2024 9:00 am

Salzburg Festival doesn’t mess about. The offerings this year include an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain in Lithuanian, a…

Forget the Proms and Edinburgh – the Three Choirs Festival is where it’s at

3 August 2024 9:00 am

The Proms have started but there is a world elsewhere, and in Worcester Cathedral the 296th Three Choirs Festival set…

An ensemble achievement that dances and sparkles: Glyndebourne’s Giulio Cesare reviewed

6 July 2024 9:00 am

A classic opera production ages like wine. When David McVicar’s staging of Handel’s Giulio Cesare first opened at Glyndebourne in…