Schubert
Playing until her fingers bled: the dedication of the pianist Maria Yudina
The 20th century was an amazing time for Russian pianists, and the worse things got, politically and militarily, the more…
Alan Rusbridger on the joys of four-hand piano
One of the few social activities not yet prohibited under lockdown laws is four-handed piano playing. I don’t mean sitting…
A silly, bouncy delight: Glyndebourne's In the Market for Love reviewed
Offenbach at Glyndebourne! Short of Die Soldaten with a picnic break or a period-instrument revival of Jerry Springer: The Opera,…
West Side Story’s flick-knife-to-the-guts thrill never landed its final blow
It was as though Damien Hirst had confessed a secret passion for Victorian watercolours, or Lars von Trier had admitted…
A Winterreise that included a mistake of genius
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of approach to performing Schubert’s Winterreise, though sometimes there’s doubt or dispute about which…
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…
Make mine a double
If two concert pianists are performing a work written for two grand pianos, there are two ways you can position…
Schubert’s Lieder as never before
There can be no good reason why Graham Johnson’s marvellous three-volume encyclopaedia of Schubert’s songs has been so neglected by…
Why Daniel Barenboim should be the next head of the Berlin Phil
Daniel Barenboim is back in town: the South Bank is mounting a ‘Barenboim Project 2015’ in which he’s playing the…
Those ancient Greeks were bores — but things are looking up
Thick snow is falling hard and heavy, muffling sounds and turning the picturesque village postcard beautiful. I am lying in…
Is this 65-year-old British pianist the next big thing in classical music?
Earlier this month the Wigmore Hall was sold out for a Schubert recital by a concert pianist whose only solo…
My Schubert marathon
Just how much fun is it listening to all 650 of Schubert’s songs, asks Damian Thompson
I know how to cure my music addiction
About 30 years ago, not long before he died, my father bought an LP of Sir Clifford Curzon playing Schubert’s…
