Adam Fischer’s kinship with this music seems to grow exponentially with each successive instalment of what is already proving an exceptional Mahler cycle. There’s a stylistic and emotional understanding which goes beyond the precisely annotated scores. It…
Claudio Abbado stepped down from his post as Chief Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in May 2002 on the stage of the Musikverein, Vienna. 4000 roses rained down on his departure. Just over a decade later…
A compendium of popular and streetwise Lenny for Bernstein 100 – and the virtuosic trombonist in Christian Lindberg surely gives him a jazzer’s head-start on just how this music should go. It certainly feels that way. I…
With the arrival of this column came the reinstatement of an important strand of repertoire in Gramophone’s pages – Musical Theatre. As I have argued for some time – in these pages and elsewhere – Music Theatre…
The distinction between objectivity and subjectivity is crucial in Mahler and it doesn’t take long to establish that Vanska’s bias is emphatically towards the former. The opening Allegro energico ma non troppo is very non troppo indeed…
The more live performances, the more live recordings, one experiences of this marvellous piece the more challenging it seems. No question that Bernstein’s inaugural recording – with an extraordinary cast that had been in intensive rehearsal for…
She adorns the front cover of this issue just as she has so many magazine covers in the 100 years since her birth – but eclipsing every personal memory of Birgit Nilsson on record and in the…
The title, the concept, the casting would seem to have Broadway success written all over it. A musical about the bitter rivalry between two iconic cosmetic giants – Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden – who never met…
The opening of this tremendous piece reveals so much about a performance. Before the invasion, before the siege of Leningrad, there is buoyancy and uplift and hopefulness in the confidant and forthright theme which begins and indeed…
The dramatic and somewhat predictably mixed reaction to Barrie Kosky’s staging of Bizet’s Carmen at the Royal Opera House recently (a show first seen in Frankfurt in 2016) once again raised questions as to how far opera…
