Classical music
‘Darmstadt taught me how to compose’: Ennio Morricone interviewed
Ennio Morricone’s staff wish it to be known that he does not write soundtracks. ‘Maestro Morricone writes “Film Music” NOT…
The truth about Wilhelm Furtwängler
The morning after the first night of Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides in May 1995, I received a call from Otto…
The gentle side of Bruckner
The lady behind me on Kensington Gore clearly felt that she owed her friend an apology: ‘It’s Bruckner. I don’t…
The Budapest Festival Orchestra make all other orchestra look routine and oafish
Looney Tunes was always at its best when soundtracked by a Hungarian gypsy dance. (Watch ‘Pigs in a Polka’ if…
An exalted experience even without a convincing central character: Siegfried in Edinburgh reviewed
There’s one big problem with Wagner’s Siegfried, and the clue’s in the name. None of Wagner’s mature works hangs so…
Music’s Brexit
It’s October 1895 and the spirit of Music has been absent from Britain for exactly 200 years. Why she fled,…
An embarrassing and misshapen dud: Opera Holland Park’s Isabeau reviewed
I’ve been trying to pinpoint the exact moment when it became impossible to take Mascagni’s Isabeau seriously. It wasn’t when…
Classical music is awash with virtue-signalling
All my life I’ve wanted to compose music, and now I’ve done it. I’ve written a sonata for solo flute…
You vote for my pupil, I’ll vote for yours – the truth about music competitions
A young Korean, 22 years old, won the Dublin International Piano Competition last month. Nothing unusual about that. Koreans and…
I don’t get why people worship Bach
I don’t get Johann Sebastian Bach. I mean, I get that he was good — no Mozart, sure, but definitely…
Garsington makes as good a case as you can for Strauss’s frothy Capriccio
‘Is there an end [to this opera] that is not trivial?’ asks the Countess in her final bars of Richard…
Cold and confusing: Garsington’s Die Zauberflöte reviewed
The picnic hamper’s open, the bubbly is chilled, and country house opera is starting to eat itself. When you arrive…
I dread the extinction of boys’ choirs
One by one, cathedrals have succumbed to the inevitable. In blazes of publicity, with front-page photographs of girls in cassocks…
How does David Matthews get away with writing symphonies with tunes in them?
‘All fish in flood and fowl of flight/ Be mirthful now and make melody’ writes the poet William Dunbar in…
How hospices make you think differently about life
The timing of the Today programme’s series about hospices could not have been more apt, coming as it did so…
Dudamel’s Amériques made The Rite of Spring sound like Einaudi
Apparently it’s called ‘expectation management’. Pollux, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s new work for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, takes its name from…
An unmitigated triumph: Salome at Opera North reviewed
Salome is my favourite opera by Richard Strauss, the only one where there is no danger, at any point, of…
Why be so frightened of Enoch Powell’s speech now?
It was a provocative decision by the producers of Archive on 4, 50 Years On: Rivers of Blood (Nathan Gower…
Martha Kearney’s arrival at Today is a breath of fresh air
Like a breath of fresh air Martha Kearney has arrived on Radio 4’s Today programme, taking over from Sarah Montague…
Mozart died too late rather than too early. Discuss.
Glenn Gould used to say that Mozart died too late rather than too early. The remark was intended to get…
Iceland’s national composer returns from oblivion
The lur is a horn, modelled in bronze after a number of 3,000-year-old instruments discovered at various archaeological sites across…
How Debussy slipped past Wagner into the unknown
A spectre haunted the first weekend of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Debussy Festival: the spectre of Richard Wagner.…
A short history of French musical decadence
My two attempts to see Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites at the Guildhall School were frustrated by the weather. Forced back…
Remembering one of the best – and bitchiest – pianists who ever lived
I’m unlucky with Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata. Twice in the past year I’ve bolted for the exit as soon the pianist…
The sex lives of conductors
I once knew a great conductor who claimed that he never boarded a plane to a new orchestra without a…
