Classical music
In search of an ending
There are many Symphonies No. 10 by Gustav Mahler, or none. The situation is rare, if not unique, in the…
Master of the notes
Stepping into the Sistine Chapel, the choir loft is probably the last thing you’d notice. ‘Loft’ is, frankly, a stretch…
Mozart’s footnotes
There are worse fates than posthumous obscurity. When Mozart visited Munich in October 1777, he was initially reluctant to visit…
Where to start with Ethel Smyth
I’m reminded of an old Irish joke. A tourist approaches a local for directions to Dublin. The local, after much…
Without borders
Community music-making is the unifying jewel in the British crown, says James MacMillan
Terrifying divas and lesbian separatists
The promise of the internet was supposed to be thus: you could be your own bizarre, inappropriate self, and you…
Alive and kicking
Rachmaninov’s First Symphony begins with a snarl, and gets angrier. A menacing skirl from the woodwinds, a triple-fortissimo blast from…
Colourisations and scale models
Another week, another online concert; and since orchestral music seems likely to be confined to screens and stereos for a…
From screen to stage
It’s my new lockdown ritual. Switch on the telly, cue up the menu and scroll down to where the vintage…
From bad joke to 21st-century classic
Erich Korngold was what you might call an early adopter. As a child prodigy in Habsburg Vienna, he’d astonished the…
Holy maximalism
The two most depressing words in contemporary classical music? That’s easy: holy minimalism. I know, I know. Lots of people…
Britain’s got talent
Brexit and Covid have pushed us out of the common musical market and thrown us back on homegrown sprouts. Good, says Norman Lebrecht
The trying game
Rosie Millard dispels the myth that persistence is always rewarded
Brendel the Dadaist
How many people are celebrating the fact that, last week, one of Europe’s most inspired writers about music, modern art…
A pan-European cheese dream
The best moment in the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Day Concert comes after the end of the advertised programme.…
The pleasures of four-play
One of the few social activities not yet prohibited under lockdown laws is four-handed piano playing. I don’t mean sitting…
Ambassador, you are really spoiling us
In classical music circles, Christmas arrives with the overture to Handel’s Messiah. Or so they’ll tell you. In truth, festivities…
Recorded delivery
For an orchestra to lose one anniversary concert may be regarded as unfortunate. To lose two? Welcome to 2020. The…
Going for a song
Alexandra Coghlan on how we became a nation of choirs and carollers
Drama vs display
It is amazing what fine performances you can get beamed to your computer these days. Slightly less amazing is the…
Trick or treat
The timing couldn’t be better. Just as the gates clang shut on another national lockdown, trapping us all indefinitely with…
Panto at Glyndebourne
Offenbach at Glyndebourne! Short of Die Soldaten with a picnic break or a period-instrument revival of Jerry Springer: The Opera,…
Fish and fire
Anyone who invited the Russian composer Mily Balakirev to dinner had to be jolly careful about the fish they served.…
All together now
It’s the breath I miss most. The moment when a shuffling group of men and women in scruffy concert blacks…
Paradis regained
Selina Mills on Maria Theresia von Paradis, the gifted but forgotten 18th-century composer, whose story will finally be told in a new chamber opera
