Schoenberg
The joy of composers’ graves
I called on Hugo Wolf the other week, and he didn’t look too great. He wouldn’t, of course; he died…
Robin Holloway lambasts some of our most beloved composers
Works by Strauss, Holst, Rossini, Schoenberg and Wagner are all targeted, while Hildegard of Bingen’s music is pronounced a ‘psychedelic bore’
Kingsley goes to the toilet
In 1978, I gave a poetry reading at Hull University. Philip Larkin was glumly, politely, in attendance. I was duly…
Schoenberg owes his survival to crime drama
George Gershwin once made a home movie of Arnold Schoenberg grinning in a suit on his tennis court in Beverly…
Simon Rattle’s Messiaen is improving with age
Two flutes, a clarinet and a bassoon breathe a chord on the edge of silence. As they fade, the sound…
What does it mean to be ‘moved’ by something?
Catching a train last week at London’s St Pancras I encountered a man playing a piano. You can do this…
Off the page
Dance has its own archaeological periods, and 2016’s schedules are confirming what 2015 indicated — that the era of dances…
Bored by Brahms
Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet begins, writes his biographer Jan Swafford, with ‘a gentle, dying-away roulade that raises a veil of autumnal…
Ménage à trois
Mark Baldwin, artistic director of Rambert Dance, must take responsibility for most of the good times I’ve had recently, midwife…
Celebrations of song and humanity
‘All my life, always and in every way, I shall have one objective: the good of Hungary and the Hungarian…
Mistress of modernism
What classical music really needs is more performers like Barbara Hannigan. Philip Clark meets theself-conducting soprano
People and their prophets
On paper, Moses und Aron might seem intractable and abstract: a 12-tone score setting a libretto that meditates on God,…
