Olivier Messiaen’s musical language is a world unto itself, spanning cultures, continents, and eras in both structure and form. Fascinated by birdsong, complicated rhythms, and
There have been quite a few film versions of the Anglo-Saxon epic myth Beowulf, a cinematic gift that keeps on giving with a ferocious dragon,
Vilde Frang took the Elgar into her repertoire some five years ago and she has the measure of one of the composer’s most private, oblique
The last time I heard Evgeny Kissin in a solo recital was here, at the Barbican, in 2019, a full year before Covid-chaos and three
In the canon of G&S operettas, Ruddigore (1887) is perhaps best known as the work which satirises nineteenth-century melodrama and gothic horror stories, and offended Victorian sensibilities by having
Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges (1925) is usually paired with his other one Act opera, L’heure espagnole. But in the Royal College of Music Opera Studio’s double bill
It might help the wider dissemination of these works, all newly available in officially approved
The flood of new releases from this source shows no sign of abating. And given
Two years ago I was much taken with Martyn Brabbins’s Fifth, perhaps the finest release
It was Edward Gardner’s daring idea to open his London Philharmonic tenure with a concert
Leonard Bernstein’s Candide contains some very fine music without convincing as operetta or musical. It has been
Few bona fide keyboard titans play every Prokofiev Piano Sonata, and only a small cohort
We are all influenced by our first exposures to greatness. Whether it is a person, structure or work of art, those initial contacts inform us
Venues: Dreyfoos Concert Hall, Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, West Palm Beach, January 23; Knight Concert Hall, Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, Miami, January 27
I spent ten days at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home, which brings performers, teachers and students together, enabling music-lovers to experience a wide
It is impossible to take in the scale and thoroughness of what happened in Theresienstadt (Terezín in Czech), the fortress town in Moravia that Nazi
Here are three reviews (the first two from Jane Bagot, the last from Colin Marston) of concerts that took place as part of Cumbria Opera
Tchaikovsky – Violin Concerto in D, Op.35; Sérénade mélancolique, Op.26; Valse-Scherzo, Op.34; Souvenir d’un lieu cher, Op.42* Julia Fischer (violin), Russian National Orchestra, Yakov Kreizberg
