Music
Two great pianists – but who was the headstrong youngster and who was the veteran?
Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune begins with a sigh: a long, languorous exhalation played on the lower notes of…
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…
Was Richard Strauss the greatest film composer that never was?
An opera without singers, a Strauss orchestra of just 16, and an early music ensemble playing Mahler: welcome to the…
I’d rather miss a season of Proms than the London Piano Festival
If two concert pianists are performing a work written for two grand pianos, there are two ways you can position…
Painted more shades of grey than a Farrow & Ball catalogue: The Judas Passion reviewed
‘Can the ultimate betrayal ever be forgiven?’ screams the publicity for The Judas Passion, transforming a Biblical drama into a…
Simon Rattle’s Rite of Spring was the best I’ve ever heard
I was going to start with a little moan. About the shouty marketing, the digital diarrhoea, the sycophantic drivel, which,…
Forget Bowie – our times are ripe for Black Sabbath’s worldview
To get a reminder of how strange the 1970s were, there’s no need to plough through lengthy social and political…
Simon Rattle’s job title has less clout than a viscountcy
Much fuss has been made of the title given to Sir Simon Rattle on arrival at the London Symphony Orchestra.…
The music snobby London critics love to ignore
A fortnight ago, the debut album by a young British guitar band entered the chart at No. 6. You might…
Could the new head of the Berlin Phil be a game-changer?
Two summers ago, the BBC were offered a Proms visit by the Bavarian State Orchestra with its music director, Kirill…
The BBC Proms broadcast a piece of gloriously subversive new music – without realising it
Sir James MacMillan’s European Requiem, performed at the Proms on Sunday, isn’t about Brexit. The composer had to make this…
Haydn would surely have approved of Simon Rattle’s repackaging of the symphonies
‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!’ wrote Elgar, quoting Shelley, at the top of his Second Symphony. He should…
I had to watch through my fingers: Aurora Orchestra play Brahms One from memory
Playing in an orchestra that disintegrates mid-concert is not an experience you forget. One moment everything’s motoring along nicely. Suddenly…
Glam is back
Late on the Friday afternoon of The Great Escape — the annual three-day event for which the London music industry…
The legacy of Sgt. Pepper that’s really worth celebrating is toytown pop – not prog rock
Pop’s counterfactuals tend to be built on questioning mortality: what if Jimi Hendrix had lived? Or Buddy Holly? Rarely does…
Harpsichordists at war
Harpsichordists are supposed to make love, not war: Sir Thomas Beecham famously compared the sound they make to ‘two skeletons…
How the KGB infiltrated classical music
Spare a thought for Emil Gilels, still revered today by Russians as the foremost pianist of the Soviet era. The…
I still have no idea what the LPO’s Belief and Beyond Belief season was about
The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s ‘Belief and Beyond Belief’ season is drawing to a close, without making it in any degree…
I didn't think playing all Scriabin's piano sonatas in one afternoon was possible
Just before Peter Donohoe played the last of Alexander Scriabin’s ten piano sonatas at the Guildhall’s Milton Court on Sunday,…
This is how you reimagine Bach’s St John Passion
‘The dripping blood our only drink/ The bloody flesh our only food…/ Again, in spite of that, we call this…
London’s orchestral scene is dead. Time to change the music – and some CEOs
For much of the past half-century, London has been the world’s orchestral capital. Not always in quality, but numerically without…
Meet the founder of the Boring Music Society (and possible neglected genius)
It’s always promising when the orchestra won’t fit on the stage. For the UK première, some 97 years after it…
Maurizio Pollini needs to retire
There’s a moment in the finale of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata when the frenzied piano writing turns unexpectedly jolly. The late…
Did Igor Levit’s latest Beethoven recital deserve to be booed?
Nothing pleased Iannis Xenakis more than a great big rattling storm. The sound of a thunderclap would have him running…
Spare us the gerontophilia
Brahms didn’t always have a beard. The picture in the London Symphony Orchestra’s programme book showed him clean-shaven, and rightly.…
