Philharmonia Orchestra
Three cheers for the Three Choirs Festival
The Welsh composer William Mathias died in 1992, aged 57. I was a teenager at the time, and the loss…
Thrilling: Garsington’s Queen of Spades reviewed
Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades is one of those operas that under-promises on paper but over-delivers on stage. It’s hard…
Spellbinding: Herbert Blomstedt’s Mahler 9 reviewed
Ivor Cutler called silence the music of the cognoscenti. But there’s silence and there’s silence, and a regular concertgoer hears…
Losing the plot
Leos Janacek disliked long operas, and the first act of The Makropulos Affair is a masterclass in how to set…
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:…
Method in the madness
First there were the home recitals: musicians playing solo Bach in front of their bookshelves, wonkily captured on iPhones. Next…
Joyce DiDonato seduces you within the first 10 minutes: Royal Opera’s Agrippina reviewed
‘Laws bow down before the desire to rule…’ Centuries before ‘proroguing’ had entered British breakfast-table vocabulary there was Handel’s Agrippina,…
How does David Matthews get away with writing symphonies with tunes in them?
‘All fish in flood and fowl of flight/ Be mirthful now and make melody’ writes the poet William Dunbar in…
