Mahler
The audience were in tears: Christian Gerhaher/Gerold Huber at the Wigmore Hall reviewed
‘Popular’ classical music is a relative term. Show me someone who thinks Beethoven is surefire box office, and I’ll show…
Opera North’s Rite of Spring shows the advantages of confining the music to the pit
It was Stravinsky himself who suggested that, in order to preserve its difficulty, the opening bassoon solo of The Rite…
The Budapest Festival Orchestra make all other orchestra look routine and oafish
Looney Tunes was always at its best when soundtracked by a Hungarian gypsy dance. (Watch ‘Pigs in a Polka’ if…
Cold and confusing: Garsington’s Die Zauberflöte reviewed
The picnic hamper’s open, the bubbly is chilled, and country house opera is starting to eat itself. When you arrive…
Does Gerald Barry hate music?
Blue Gadoo is one of those cats whose face looks like it’s been bashed flat with a wok. He lives…
Embarrassing – but electrifying: Bernstein 100 reviewed
‘There is something enviable about the utter lack of inhibition with which Leonard Bernstein carries on,’ wrote the critic of…
Partying like it’s 1899: two lieder recitals reviewed
If a symphony is, as Mahler famously put it, ‘like the world’, then songs and lieder are like seeing that…
Salon Strauss
An opera without singers, a Strauss orchestra of just 16, and an early music ensemble playing Mahler: welcome to the…
Vice and virtue
‘Can the ultimate betrayal ever be forgiven?’ screams the publicity for The Judas Passion, transforming a Biblical drama into a…
The sound of no hands clapping
‘We’re going to live for ever!’ declares Robert Powell as Gustav Mahler at the end of Ken Russell’s 1974 biopic.…
Bowled over by Bruckner
The two Proms concerts given on consecutive evenings by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra were well planned: a short opening work,…
Mistaken identity
This year’s Lucerne Festival is given its identity by having as its theme ‘Identity’. Since the word doesn’t mean anything,…
Gustav Mahler
When I began listening to music seriously, in about 1950, I had read about Mahler but wasn’t able to hear…
Why we love unfinished art
An unfinished painting can provide a startling glimpse of the artist at work. But the common tendency to prefer it to a finished work is being taken to extremes, says Philip Hensher
Orchestral conductors would be much better if they tried performing Renaissance music
To be honest, my friendship with Michael Tilson Thomas hasn’t gone quite as I had hoped. It started in February…
Is that Sylvie Guillem? Or R2-D2? Guillem's farewell dance at Sadler’s Wells reviewed
There’s been a clutch of middle-aged danseuses taking leave of life in one way or another recently. We’ve seen the…
Birmingham Royal Ballet review: A Father Ted Carmina Burana
We ballet-goers may be the most self-deceiving audiences in theatre. Put a ‘new work’ in front of us and half…
Even a perfect opera such as Don Giovanni improves with a good red
End of season is always bittersweet, the melting snows a bit like autumn leaves. But the days are longer and…
Mahler’s Fifth is the perfect soundtrack to a tooth extraction
Frantic chewing of sugar-coated nicotine gum had caused my left lower molar to go irretrievably rotten, and the dentist finally…
How Claudio Abbado bridged old and new
Not long ago the great conductors of classical music were general practitioners. They expected to give satisfactory interpretations of music…
Goodbye, Claudio Abbado. You helped us glimpse eternity
Fellini’s credo ‘the visionary is the only true realist’ could also be applied to the life of Claudio Abbado, who…
A world-class orchestra in the heart of São Paulo’s Crackland
Damian Thompson visits Brazil to hear Marin Alsop whip São Paulo’s orchestra into shape
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