When you are arguably the greatest violinist in the world a four-year “time out” from the public arena can seem like an eternity. But it’s a time for renewal, too, and though absence makes audiences’ hearts grow…
Miss Fortune in name and deed. Sad to say but Judith Weir’s sixth opera is an embarrassment. Sad because Weir’s folk inspired fables have won many friends, sad because she is a composerly composer whose luminous orchestral…
The Victorians have a lot to answer for. Their appetite for the Old Testament blood and thunder of Mendelssohn’s Elijah knew no bounds – and they liked it big. Size mattered and that big-is-better, choir-of-thousands, communal approach…
It’s on occasions like this that the star-rating system runs into irreconcilable difficulties. I honestly cannot remember a time when musical and theatrical values were in such total divergence. The Royal Opera’s long-overdue first staging of Dvorak’s…
The defining moment in John Adams’ opera – and Tom Morris’ staging of it – comes right at the top of a long and not unproblematic evening. And it’s a moment that should give pause for even…
Such is Berlioz’ persuasive theatricality that even when he is rearranging Shakespeare one is inclined to ask not what the Bard is doing for him but rather what he is doing for the Bard. His unprecedented Symphonie…
For the New York Philharmonic to have embarked upon a London residency without Mahler in their portfolio would have been unconscionable. It was they, after all, who brought it to the wider world under their most celebrated…
There is really very little that Marc-André Hamelin can’t or won’t do on or with a piano and he did most of it in this characteristically supersonic recital – including one wholesale assault on the Wigmore Steinway’s…
Bruckner’s unfinished final symphony – the 9th – poses many questions, none more perplexing than what might have been in terms of its absent finale. There are those who insist that the great Catholic symphonist had completely…
The occasion was Delius’ 150th birthday but more broadly it was a celebration of Englishness. Vaughan Williams’ lark ascended once more, the Philharmonia’s concert master Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay effecting the transfiguration of song into mystic musing with elegantly…