Classical
A fine romance
One swallow might not make a summer, but it certainly helps rounds the season off. ‘Perhaps, like the swallow, you…
Hail, César!
In the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes, a Broadway hoofer is forced to work at a community college,…
Sex-change soufflé
One morning in the 20th century, Thérèse wakes up next to her husband and announces that she’s a feminist. Hubby,…
Hot stuff
One legacy of lockdown in the classical music world has been the sheer length of the 21-22 season. In a…
Mourning glory
On Tuesday night I was at the world première of a motet by Sir James MacMillan and I don’t think…
Lilacs out of the dead land
April is the cruellest month, but May is shaping up quite pleasantly and the daylight streamed in through the east…
G-force
Imagine growing up with a whole orchestra as your plaything. Richard Strauss’s father was the principal horn of the Munich…
The Muppet show
There are many things to enjoy in the Royal Opera’s revival of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, but perhaps the most surprising…
Colour in the gloom
Music and politics don’t mix, runs the platitude. Looks a bit tattered now, doesn’t it? For Soviet musicians, of course,…
After the love has gone
Utopia, Limited (1893) is a rare bird, and one that every Gilbert and Sullivan completist simply has to bag. The…
Bird brained
Blame it on Serge Diaghilev. Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908 and never saw the première of his last opera, The Golden…
Away with the fairies
Scottish Opera’s new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to open in midwinter. Snow falls, fairies hurl snowballs…
Me time
I think it was when she leaned forward and balanced on one leg that Barbara Hannigan jumped the shark. It…
Too hot to handle
This year is the centenary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis, the Greek composer-architect who called himself an ancient Greek…
Refugees from Moominland
Spoiler alert. The last words in Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen come from a child playing a frog. The story…
There will be blood
Say what you like about that Duke of Mantua, but he’s basically an OK sort of bloke. A bit of…
Chorus of approval
Nabucco, said Giuseppe Verdi, ‘was born under a lucky star’. It was both his last throw of the dice and…
Booster shots of sunlight
Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra began the year with a world première. Unsuk Chin’s Second Violin Concerto…
Business as usual
It’s 2022 and classical music is, again, dead. It’d be surprising if it wasn’t. In 2014 the New Yorker published…
Northern lights
It’s not everyone’s idea of fun, a trip to Huddersfield in the depths of November. But as any veteran of…
Liquid silk
That strain again… it’s the morning after the concert and one tune is still there, playing in the head upon…
Sublime – and ridiculous
It’s the final scene of The Valkyrie and Wotan is wearing cords. They’re a sensible choice for a hard-working deity:…
Whistling the scenery
With Glyndebourne’s The Rake’s Progress, the show starts with David Hockney’s front cloth. The colour, the ingenuity, the visual bravura:…
Satisfaction guaranteed
‘Drammatico’, wrote César Franck over the opening of his Piano Quintet, and you’d better believe he meant it. The score…
Revival of the fittest
In Oliver Mears’s new production of Verdi’s Rigoletto, the curtain rises on a work of art. The stage is in…
