Classical music
Child’s play
‘Germany’s greatest artistic asset, its music, is in danger,’ warned The Spectator in June 1937. Reporting from the leading new-music…
Striking a false note
The blurb accompanying the Radio 3 series World of Classical, inviting us to ‘join the dots between classical music traditions…
Hot stuff
One legacy of lockdown in the classical music world has been the sheer length of the 21-22 season. In a…
Mourning glory
On Tuesday night I was at the world première of a motet by Sir James MacMillan and I don’t think…
Lilacs out of the dead land
April is the cruellest month, but May is shaping up quite pleasantly and the daylight streamed in through the east…
G-force
Imagine growing up with a whole orchestra as your plaything. Richard Strauss’s father was the principal horn of the Munich…
The Muppet show
There are many things to enjoy in the Royal Opera’s revival of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, but perhaps the most surprising…
The hecklers
Keith Burstein recalls a key moment in the battle for emancipation from the ivory tower of atonalism
Colour in the gloom
Music and politics don’t mix, runs the platitude. Looks a bit tattered now, doesn’t it? For Soviet musicians, of course,…
Bird brained
Blame it on Serge Diaghilev. Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908 and never saw the première of his last opera, The Golden…
Me time
I think it was when she leaned forward and balanced on one leg that Barbara Hannigan jumped the shark. It…
Too hot to handle
This year is the centenary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis, the Greek composer-architect who called himself an ancient Greek…
Refugees from Moominland
Spoiler alert. The last words in Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen come from a child playing a frog. The story…
The cowpat myth
He is caricatured as a populist and purveyor of ‘folky-wolky’ melodies, says Richard Bratby, but Vaughan Williams was a modernist master of uncompromising originality
Chorus of approval
Nabucco, said Giuseppe Verdi, ‘was born under a lucky star’. It was both his last throw of the dice and…
Booster shots of sunlight
Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra began the year with a world première. Unsuk Chin’s Second Violin Concerto…
From Russia with love
The enduring appeal of The Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky’s ravishing score is nothing less than the sound of Christmas
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Grade: B It must have been an interesting day in the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s press office when Blair Tindall’s memoir…
Liquid silk
That strain again… it’s the morning after the concert and one tune is still there, playing in the head upon…
Whistling the scenery
With Glyndebourne’s The Rake’s Progress, the show starts with David Hockney’s front cloth. The colour, the ingenuity, the visual bravura:…
Satisfaction guaranteed
‘Drammatico’, wrote César Franck over the opening of his Piano Quintet, and you’d better believe he meant it. The score…
Small but perfectly formed
Haydn is looking well — in fact, he’s positively glowing. The dignified pose; the modest, intelligent smile: it’s only when…
Roll over, Beethoven
Ian Pace on musicology’s culture wars
Going for Goldberg
I sometimes think the classical record industry would collapse if it weren’t for the Goldberg Variations. Every month brings more…
Teenage kicks
For a one-hit composer, we hear rather a lot of Pietro Mascagni. His reputation rests on his 1890 debut Cavalleria…
