Early Music
Vivid, noble and bouyant: AAM’s Messiah reviewed
More than a thousand musicians took part when Handel’s Messiah was performed in Westminster Abbey in May 1791. It wasn’t…
Meet the man who says improvisation is the key to Mozart
In August 1993, the pianist Robert Levin sat down in Walthamstow Assembly Rooms with the conductor Christopher Hogwood and the…
A Radio 3 doc that contains some of the best insults I’ve ever heard
A recent Sunday Feature on Radio 3 contained some of the best insults I have ever heard. Contributors to the…
Master of the notes
Stepping into the Sistine Chapel, the choir loft is probably the last thing you’d notice. ‘Loft’ is, frankly, a stretch…
Meet the unrivalled Sun King of early music, William Christie
It’s morning in the garden of William Christie, and he’s talking about home improvements. ‘I planted three pines up there…
Salon Strauss
An opera without singers, a Strauss orchestra of just 16, and an early music ensemble playing Mahler: welcome to the…
Time to end authenticity
They say the first step towards recovery is admitting that you have a problem. So I’m staging an intervention and…
Has there ever been a better time to be a lover of Baroque opera?
Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto,…
Bad conduct
To be honest, my friendship with Michael Tilson Thomas hasn’t gone quite as I had hoped. It started in February…
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…
Class of ’73
The death of Christopher Hogwood has deprived the world of the most successful exponent of early music there has ever…
Codes of conduct
Not long ago the great conductors of classical music were general practitioners. They expected to give satisfactory interpretations of music…
