Bach
Disconcerting but often delightful new Bach transcriptions
Grade: B Everyone loves the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Rather fewer people love the sound of an unaccompanied organ,…
Brian Cox’s Bach has to be heading for Broadway
The Score is a fine example of meat-and-potatoes theatre. Simple plotting, big characters, terrific speeches and a happy ending. The…
Are these performances of the Bach cantatas the best on record?
Three projects shedding light on the sacred music of J.S. Bach are nearing completion. The first consists of an epic…
‘Some pianists make me shake with anger’: Vikingur Olafsson interviewed
At the BBC Proms this year, an Icelandic pianist dressed like a Wall Street broker played a slow movement from…
True devotion
The 20th century was an amazing time for Russian pianists, and the worse things got, politically and militarily, the more…
Bach to basics
Bach & Sons opens with the great composer tinkling away on a harpsichord while a toddler screeches his head off…
The pleasures of four-play
One of the few social activities not yet prohibited under lockdown laws is four-handed piano playing. I don’t mean sitting…
Igor Levit’s Goldbergs were transcendental
Igor Levit has rapidly achieved cult status, as he certainly deserves. He has already reached the stage where he can…
Bach helped me survive Bergen-Belsen
One of the great joys of the 18th-century novella La petite maison is the way Jean-François de Bastide matches the…
As a symphonist, Mieczyslaw Weinberg was a master: Weinberg Weekend reviewed
It’s a strange compliment to pay a composer — that the most profound impression their music makes is of an…
The 280-mile walk that made Bach who he was
It was in his organ loft at Arnstadt that I began my acquaintance with Johann Sebastian Bach — with JSB,…
Speed limit
Slow radio is popping up everywhere at the moment — programmes that have no outward form but just meander through…
Vice and virtue
‘Can the ultimate betrayal ever be forgiven?’ screams the publicity for The Judas Passion, transforming a Biblical drama into a…
An orchestrated race storm
A fascinating story has emerged from a north-western leftie quadrant of the United States: the sacking of British conductor Matthew…
Born again
Six years ago, on Good Friday, the journalist Melanie Reid was thrown off her horse while on a cross-country ride…
God’s messenger
Damian Thompson talks to the great Bach conductor — and strict Calvinist — Masaaki Suzuki
Organic chemistry
My old Oxford college, Mansfield, isn’t a famous establishment, though its current principal, ‘Baroness Helena Kennedy’, as she incorrectly styles…
Bach breaking
It’s just not what you expect to hear on Radio 3 but I happened upon Music Matters on Saturday morning…
The polyphonous Babel of global music
‘Following custom, when the Siamese conquered the Khmer they carried off much of the population, including most of their musicians,…
John Eliot Gardiner
Sir John Eliot Gardiner is talented almost beyond measure. His Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists and stupidly named Orchestre Révolutionnaire…
Wife swap
My impression that Bach has come to rival Shakespeare as a flawless reference point in the cultural life of the…
Long life
Whether or not you believe in the afterlife, death remains an impenetrable mystery. One moment a person is making jokes…
Bach triumphant
A few weeks ago I was at the perfect wedding. My young friend Will Heaven, a comment editor at the…
In sickness and in health
Last week on Front Row (Radio 4) the singer Joyce DiDonato recalled the advice she gave the new graduates of…
