Ravel
A cracking little 1967 opera that we ought to see more often
Ravel’s L’heure espagnole is set in a clockmaker’s shop and the first thing you hear is ticking and chiming. It’s…
Instantly captivating: the mysterious harmonies of Erik Satie
The French composer’s aesthetic was so influential that he gave us the sound of the contemporary world, says Ian Penman
Poulenc’s Stabat Mater – sacred, fervent and always on the verge of breaking into giggles
It’s funny what you see at orchestral concerts. See, that is, not just hear. If you weren’t in the hall…
Sunny Schubert and iridescent Ravel: album of the week
Grade: A Maurice Ravel was tougher than he looked. True, he dressed like a dandy and wrote an opera about…
Barbara Hannigan needs to stop conducting while singing
Last week, Barbara Hannigan conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in Haydn, Roussel, Ravel and Britten, though to be honest she…
The miracle of watching a great string quartet perform
Joseph Haydn, it’s generally agreed, invented the string quartet. And having done so, he re-invented it: again and again. Take…
Kitchen-table opera
Covid has been many things to the arts — most of them unprintable. A plague, a scourge, a disaster from…
Enclosure acts
‘I don’t want to do my work. I want to go for a walk. I want to eat all the…
Surfer’s paradise
The full addictive potential of classical YouTube needs to be experienced to be understood. And let’s be honest, there are…
A Beggar’s Opera that beggars belief in Edinburgh
Robert Carsen’s new updating of The Beggar’s Opera is a coke-snorting, trash-talking, breakdancing, palm-greasing, skirt-hiking, rule-breaking affair — and every…
Speed limit
Slow radio is popping up everywhere at the moment — programmes that have no outward form but just meander through…
Small wonders
It has been a reasonably good week for peripatetic opera-loving female-underwear fetishists. In La bohème at Covent Garden Musetta slipped…
The kids are all right
In a remote fishing village a lone figure confronts an unexplained death, standing tormented but unbroken against fate, the community…
Watching the clocks
When I saw the first performance of this production of Ravel’s two operas at Glyndebourne three years ago, I thought…
