Classical music
Going solo
Our college choirmaster had a trick that he liked to deploy when he sensed that we were phoning it in.…
Sold down the river
The roots of the Southbank Centre’s current crisis stretch back to before the pandemic, says Oliver Basciano
Barely touching the void
The Royal Albert Hall, as Douglas Adams never wrote, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely,…
Parallel universe
There wasn’t going to be a Lucerne Festival this year. The annual month-long squillion-dollar international beano got cancelled, along with…
The original Edinburgh festival
James Sadler’s 1815 balloon flight, a Fringe first, heralded the greatest musical extravaganza that Scotland had ever seen, says John D. Halliday
The joy of going to a real concert…
I went to a concert! Not a livestream or download: a real concert, with real musicians, a real conductor, a…
‘Where I grew up, classical music was diversity’
Richard Bratby talks to Birmingham Opera Company’s new music director Alpesh Chauhan about his Brummie roots, Bruckner and how his BAME heritage is a non-story
The keys to Beethoven
If you want to understand Beethoven, listen to his piano sonatas. Without them, you’ll never grasp how the same man…
Scouse style
Richard Bratby on Britain’s oldest and ballsiest orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, which has taken on everyone from gang leaders to Derek Hatton
It’ll end in tears
It was the fourth time, or maybe the fifth, that I found myself reaching for the tissues that I began…
Live and let die
Remember when 2020 was going to be Beethoven year? There were going to be cycles and festivals, recordings and reappraisals;…
Dallas with violins
On the face of it, a French-language drama about a Parisian symphony orchestra mightn’t sound like the most action-packed of…
From joy to dissolution
At the start of Elgar’s Second Symphony the full orchestra hovers, poised. It pulls back; and then, like a dam…
Swanky, stale and sullen
The summer music festival has had its day, says Norman Lebrecht
Surfer’s paradise
The full addictive potential of classical YouTube needs to be experienced to be understood. And let’s be honest, there are…
The best recordings of Bruckner’s Eighth
I am daunted. Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony is a work that I regard with love, awe and even anxiety. I always…
Forget me not
No surprise: the greatest musical experience of my life was Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1962. I thought at the time…
Meet the Mozarts
It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premièred his new opera. How do you reward…
Like a prayer
In the autumn of 1632, a man called Kaspar Schisler returned home to the small Bavarian town of Oberammergau. He…
Radio 3 presenters
Anyone who has listened regularly to Radio 3 over the decades — not to mention the Third Programme, which Radio…
Haydn seek
As Joseph Haydn was getting out of bed on the morning of 10 May 1809, a cannonball landed in his…
Raiding the sonic store cupboard
There’s a certain merit in bluntness. ‘Quarantine Soirées’ was what the Budapest Festival Orchestra called its response to the crisis,…
Bigamists, lunatics and adventurers
The world of 19th-century British music was raucous, but are there any masterpieces waiting to be rediscovered? wonders Richard Bratby
The alienation effect
‘People may say I can’t sing,’ said the soprano Florence Foster Jenkins, ‘but no one can ever say I didn’t…
Apex carnivore
Beethoven wears a feather boa and pink shades. He wrangles an electric guitar. A red lightning flash streaks across that…
