singing
Letters
A new prescription Sir: It is maddening to see the British people being refused face-to-face GP appointments and subjected to…
Let hymn in
The silencing of indoor singing is senseless
‘My voice is a curse’
Steve Morris talks to Gary Numan about luck, plane-spotting and Asperger’s
The Spectator’s Notes
We are being urged — and, in some cases, paid — by the government to plant more trees. Actually, this…
Low life
Although I was ten minutes early, Vernon was there ahead of me, framed in the ancient chapel doorway, chatting up…
The day the music died
Britain’s choirs are facing oblivion. Yet they’re also terrified of returning. One story explains why. Picture this innocent choral-society scene…
Glyndebourne’s Der Rosenkavalier never forgets to be funny
‘Comedy for music by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Music by Richard Strauss.’ That’s what the creators of Der Rosenkavalier wrote on…
I dread the extinction of boys’ choirs
One by one, cathedrals have succumbed to the inevitable. In blazes of publicity, with front-page photographs of girls in cassocks…
‘I was really, really scared’: Jonas Kaufmann opens up about his #MeToo moment
‘Hi, it’s Jonas.’ When the great tenor rings from Vienna, I ask if there are any topics he wants me…
Nick Coleman hears better with half an ear than the rest of us do with two
If you’ve ever had a text or email thread spiral wildly and unexpectedly out of control or clocked a couple…
Partying like it’s 1899: two lieder recitals reviewed
If a symphony is, as Mahler famously put it, ‘like the world’, then songs and lieder are like seeing that…
Ave, Maria
Anyone who thinks that an artist’s life is irrelevant to their artistic achievement, and for that matter anyone who thinks…
Deluded divas
Were Florence Foster Jenkins and her fellow culprits touchingly heroic, cynically fraudulent or just plain bonkers? Rupert Christiansen reports
Striking the wrong note
Before we turn our attention to Florence Foster Jenkins — but if you can’t wait, it’s so-so — I feel…
Frank’s world
‘He never went away. All those other things that we thought were here to stay, they did go away. But…
Punk in a funk
Look up Tracey Thorn’s live performances with Everything But The Girl or Massive Attack on You Tube and you’ll find…
Mistress of modernism
What classical music really needs is more performers like Barbara Hannigan. Philip Clark meets theself-conducting soprano
High and mighty
One of the most complete bars to the authentic performance of both baroque opera and some renaissance polyphony is the…
Save the carol!
A glorious, healthy and intensely pleasurable tradition is in danger
Cultural revolution
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
