Classical music
Deluded divas
Were Florence Foster Jenkins and her fellow culprits touchingly heroic, cynically fraudulent or just plain bonkers? Rupert Christiansen reports
Last words
This, my 479th, is to be my last contribution as a regular columnist to The Spectator. I have written here…
Service with a smile
He’s been billed as the new Pied Piper but it’s going to take a while for Tom Service to quite…
Sound and vision
Janacek’s Jenufa, his first great opera, had a one-night stand at the Royal Festival Hall last Monday, courtesy of the…
BBC Proms
BBC Proms 2016 is about as exciting as my sock drawer. But it’s unclear who exactly is to blame. The…
Girl power
Hurrah for Radio 3 and its (long-overdue) efforts to give us music not just performed by women but composed, and…
Organic chemistry
My old Oxford college, Mansfield, isn’t a famous establishment, though its current principal, ‘Baroness Helena Kennedy’, as she incorrectly styles…
Sound and fury
No one is consulted. No one is held to account. No one has the authority to turn it off. How…
Age concern
Daniel Barenboim back at the Festival Hall! Cue The Grand March of the Musical Luvvies Across Hungerford Bridge, a bustling…
Boulez est mort
Pierre Boulez, who died last week at the age of 90, would have been the last person, one hopes, to…
In two minds
There are some operas, as there are some people, that it is impossible to establish a settled relationship with, and…
Murder, he wrote
The allure of Carlo Gesualdo, eighth Count of Conza and third Prince of Venosa, has been felt by music-lovers from…
Musical maestros and football managers have more in common than you think
You don’t have to be a follower of Liverpool Football Club, or football at all, to spot the difference. Two…
Has there ever been a better time to be a lover of Baroque opera?
Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto,…
Bored by Brahms
Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet begins, writes his biographer Jan Swafford, with ‘a gentle, dying-away roulade that raises a veil of autumnal…
Fantasy on ice
In this exciting new era of Spectator cruises I have been put in mind of a dream event long in…
My Schubert cruise was a transport of delight
Michael Henderson is transported to raptures on a Schubert cruise
Deadlier than the male
Last week a 17-year-old girl forced the Edexcel exam board to change its A-level music syllabus to include the work…
Bad conduct
To be honest, my friendship with Michael Tilson Thomas hasn’t gone quite as I had hoped. It started in February…
Shtumming the spiel
London may cry foul over Hamlet’s misplaced to-be-ing and not-to-be-ing but Edinburgh is in raptures over a Magic Flute which…
Orchestral infallibility
Watching the Berlin Philharmonic going into conclave to choose a successor to Simon Rattle — after countless hours of secret…
Diary
There’s nothing quite like a First Night — and last Friday we launched the Proms, the most celebrated classical music…
The London ear
It’s easy to tag the city’s terrain by writer. But what, wonders Philip Clark, might a map of its music look like?
Première league
This year the Proms are to stage 21 world premières and 11 European, UK or London premières. It is good…
‘Oh André!’
André Rieu is a demigod among classical performing artists – and my mother loves him
