Proms
‘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…
Manacorda’s thrills and spills at Prom 72
At a Hollywood party in the 1940s, the garrulous socialite Elsa Maxwell spotted Arnold Schoenberg, then teaching music at UCLA,…
A lively showcase for a great central European orchestra at the Proms
As the Proms season enters the home straight, it’s moved up a gear, with a string of high profile European…
Sonic enchantment
We used to call it a ‘meat and two veg’ programme, back in my concert planning days: the reliable set…
Winging it
‘Audience Choice’ was the promise at the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s Sunday matinee Prom, and come on – who could resist…
Comrades in arms
There were times during last Friday’s First Night of the Proms when it felt as if we’d been transported back…
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,…
Snap, crackle, shriek…
So it finally happened: I experienced my first vocal setting of the word ‘Covid’. An encounter that was, inevitably, more…
Divine comedy
Arthur Sullivan knew better than to mess with a winning formula. ‘Cox and Box, based on J. Maddison Morton’s farce…
The human condition
Opera buffs enjoy their jargon. We all do it, scattering words like ‘spinto’ and ‘Fach’ like an enthusiastic pizza waiter…
Vintage Vick
At the end of Birmingham Opera Company’s RhineGold, as the gods stood ready to enter Valhalla, Donner swung a baseball…
Class acts
The Last Night of the Proms came and went, and it was pretty much as anyone might have predicted, if…
Going solo
Our college choirmaster had a trick that he liked to deploy when he sensed that we were phoning it in.…
Our Belarusian blind spot
I’d always rather liked the Finns, until I came across the conductor Dalia Stasevska. When I asked my mother what…
Diary
Staying in Britain for the summer has been, in many ways, entirely glorious. We have zigzagged from Shropshire through Derbyshire…
Barometer
About Last Night It was suggested that the BBC might ‘decolonise’ the Last Night of the Proms by removing ‘Rule,…
Swanky, stale and sullen
The summer music festival has had its day, says Norman Lebrecht
The rude, ripe tastelessness of John Eliot Gardiner’s Berlioz is the perfect antidote to Haitink’s Instagram Bruckner
Conducting is one of those professions — being monarch is perhaps another — where the less you do, the more…
Often baffling but ultimately entertaining: Britten’s Paul Bunyan reviewed
‘I feel I have learned lots about what not to write for the theatre…’ There’s a prevailing idea that the…
The gentle side of Bruckner
The lady behind me on Kensington Gore clearly felt that she owed her friend an apology: ‘It’s Bruckner. I don’t…
The Budapest Festival Orchestra make all other orchestra look routine and oafish
Looney Tunes was always at its best when soundtracked by a Hungarian gypsy dance. (Watch ‘Pigs in a Polka’ if…
A Beggar’s Opera that beggars belief in Edinburgh
Robert Carsen’s new updating of The Beggar’s Opera is a coke-snorting, trash-talking, breakdancing, palm-greasing, skirt-hiking, rule-breaking affair — and every…
Music’s Brexit
It’s October 1895 and the spirit of Music has been absent from Britain for exactly 200 years. Why she fled,…
