Sibelius

Robin Holloway lambasts some of our most beloved composers

Irreverent, outspoken and unfailingly opinionated, with knowledge as broad as his vocabulary, Robin Holloway is exactly the person you’d want to sit next to at a concert. The warmest of interval chardonnays would spontaneously chill and fizz at his exhilarating put-downs; the music would be brighter, clearer and more compelling for his idiosyncratic analysis. But travel companions are a different breed. Would you set out on an odyssey through the history of western music with him as your sole guide and companion? Holloway is a fixture of British classical music – as a significant composer, teacher of other yet more significant composers and, since 1975, one of the longest standing

Doesn’t get better than this: The Threepenny Opera, at Edinburgh International Festival, reviewed

It’s the Edinburgh International Festival, and Barrie’s back in town. Once, Edinburgh was pretty much the only place that you could see Barrie Kosky directing in the UK; there was a satisfyingly transgressive thrill about an opera director whose priorities were so self-evidently about the whole art form that he’d happily stage Monteverdi as a tango-powered revue. In recent years, Baz the Knife has supplied increasingly rare moments of discovery amid the EIF’s all-you-can-eat buffet of touring orchestras and reheated prestige productions. But he’s not the rare bird he was. In fact, with a Carmen in rep at Covent Garden and a new London Rheingold coming soon after his Dialogues