Classical music
Mistaken identity
This year’s Lucerne Festival is given its identity by having as its theme ‘Identity’. Since the word doesn’t mean anything,…
Time to end authenticity
They say the first step towards recovery is admitting that you have a problem. So I’m staging an intervention and…
Losing our religion
Sir James MacMillan’s European Requiem, performed at the Proms on Sunday, isn’t about Brexit. The composer had to make this…
Beethoven: Missa solemnis
When you first encounter it, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis can sound like the Ninth Symphony with more singing but no tunes.…
The joy of the Proms
Summer nights, hot and humid, mean just one thing — it’s Proms season again. Sore feet, sweaty armpits, queuing outside…
Hadyn recreated
‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!’ wrote Elgar, quoting Shelley, at the top of his Second Symphony. He should…
Gustav Mahler
When I began listening to music seriously, in about 1950, I had read about Mahler but wasn’t able to hear…
Myth-making
For years I have been telling people that they should listen to, in the absence of staged performances, Enescu’s opera…
Verdi
Verdi has a peculiar if not unique place in the pantheon of great composers. If you love classical music at…
Unsung hero
One of the greatest choral symphonies of the 20th century, entitled Das Siegeslied (Psalm of Victory), has been heard only…
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…
