This would be a Prom like no other, we were told at the outset. And indeed it was, thanks to its unconventional auditorium: the low-ceilinged top floor of a multi-storey car-park in downtown Peckham, ...Read More
Ilan Volkov has grown steadily in stature as a conductor during his years in Scotland, but his direction of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Gerard Grisey’s Dérives was simply masterly. ‘Sp...Read More
Peter Hall’s theatrical and operatic legacy is vast, but one of the productions at the heart of it is his A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which opened to universal plaudits in 1981. He and his creative...Read More
Fresh from his exertions with his Requiem, Brahms nonchalantly dismissed his first set of Liebeslieder-Waltzer in a letter to his publisher as ‘trifles’, though he was also pretty confident of the...Read More
Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (WEDO), created in 1999, is by no means the only youth orchestra to have emerged from the cauldron of the Middle East. Four years later in Ramallah, t...Read More
Trailing acclaimed recordings, and laden with awards including a $500,000 MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, 54-year-old Stephen Hough is the undisputed top dog among British concert pianists. He is even m...Read More
A quicksilver art If the music of Thomas Larcher reflects conflicting impulses at a very deep level, it also reflects the triumphant resolution of those conflicts. He’s a virtuoso concert pianist ...Read More
Sardonically christened ‘Lisztomania’ by the German poet Heinrich Heine, an infectious disease swept through musical Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. Women were its main victims, with fetishi...Read More
Barbican: Murray Perahia Jun 20 Royal Festival Hall: Richard Goode May 25 Wigmore Hall: Till Fellner May 30; Yevgeny Sudbin June 16; St James’s Church, Piccadilly: June 17 Murray Perahia is o...Read More
When dictators stifle dissent, the art which survives is music, and it’s no surprise that the soprano recently taking London’s Royal Opera House by storm should have been born and bred in Enver Ho...Read More