Last words
This, my 479th, is to be my last contribution as a regular columnist to The Spectator. I have written here…
Modernist cul-de-sac
The intransigence of Maxwell Davies, Boulez and Stockhausen is coming home to roost. Here were three composers, famous if not…
ENO must go…
Last week Darren Henley, chief executive of Arts Council England, revealed that opera receives just under a fifth of the…
Sound and fury
No one is consulted. No one is held to account. No one has the authority to turn it off. How…
Murder, he wrote
The allure of Carlo Gesualdo, eighth Count of Conza and third Prince of Venosa, has been felt by music-lovers from…
Fantasy on ice
In this exciting new era of Spectator cruises I have been put in mind of a dream event long in…
Bad conduct
To be honest, my friendship with Michael Tilson Thomas hasn’t gone quite as I had hoped. It started in February…
Orchestral infallibility
Watching the Berlin Philharmonic going into conclave to choose a successor to Simon Rattle — after countless hours of secret…
Première league
This year the Proms are to stage 21 world premières and 11 European, UK or London premières. It is good…
Evolutionary road
As Sepp Blatter has so affectingly remarked, the organisation he formerly headed needs evolution, not revolution. There is a consensus…
Mexican wave
Tours that start in Mexico have a nasty habit of repeating on one. Of all the British groups touring in…
Wife swap
My impression that Bach has come to rival Shakespeare as a flawless reference point in the cultural life of the…
Glad to be Grey
Great works of art may have a strange afterlife. Deracinated from the world that created them they are at the…
Saved by Spotify
We have all read about the current woeful state of the CD industry — how it is 28 per cent…
High and mighty
One of the most complete bars to the authentic performance of both baroque opera and some renaissance polyphony is the…
Chorus of approval
One of the growth areas of contemporary music is in setting sacred texts. It might be thought that I had…
Cultural revolution
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Class of ’73
The death of Christopher Hogwood has deprived the world of the most successful exponent of early music there has ever…
Buried treasure
One might have expected the streets of Edinburgh, especially at festival time, to bear some evidence of the political struggle…
Pitch perfect
To go from the second day of the England v. India Test match at Lord’s to the Albert Hall for…
The Wright stuff
Roger Wright’s precipitate departure from both Radio Three and the Proms came as a surprise. At first the news was…
Worshipping Bach
When I was first learning about classical music, 50 years ago, the scene was more streamlined than it is now.…
Perfect harmony
To curate a festival these days is to put oneself in the firing line. There is every chance that all…
Bad behaviour
W.H.Auden once wrote: ‘Real artists are not nice people. All their best feelings go into their work and life has…
Bring on the young
One of the unlooked-for side effects of the financial crisis has been what might be called the desocialising of music…
