Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the shower… the sound of those slicing, dicing, violin glissandi – halfway between screams and flashes of cold steel – sent ripples of recognition and nervous…
The building had barely cooled down after the Simon Bolivar Mahler the previous night but youth still ruled at the Proms with the arrival of our own National Youth Orchestra and that eternal wild child Nigel Kennedy…
The Royal Albert Hall can be an intimate place, mysteriously transforming on occasions from monster auditorium to private salon. There’s something about a small group of players, or in this case singers – the BBC Singers –…
At 33, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Music Dirctor Andris Nelsons is young but still almost a decade older than Richard Strauss was when he showed the world how he planned to go on with his…
The aria – “Ebben? Ne andrò lontano” – famously adorning the films Diva and A Single Man is almost as ubiquitous as the eponymous heroine’s name – which features in the Guinness Book of Records as being…
Homecomings, real and imagined, marked out this season’s Hallé Prom. For Sibelius, brazen horn fanfares and myriad string ostinati carried us at the gallop to the heart of the Finnish heartlands. Everything in his rarely performed Scènes…
Two entire blocks of stalls and at least a third of the arena had been commandeered by the children’s choruses and four brass bands, each with its own timpanist; the combined BBC National Orchestra of Wales and…
You couldn’t see the Lone Ranger for dust – and I doubt we’ve ever heard the most famous gallop in music despatched with such fleet-footed (or should that be hooved) panache. But there are another four or…
Bring together three of the most intuitive talents (and biggest stars) on the planet, meld them under the baton of Antonio Pappano whose command of every caress, swoon, and dramatic impulse of Puccini’s Tosca is not learned…
The words are in French but still familiar – “Once upon a time….” – and the story which follows, Cendrillon (that’s Cinderella to you and me), is writ large across the surfaces of Barbara de Limburg’s set,…