In 2011 I published the profile below of the pianist Nick van Bloss in ‘The Independent on Sunday’, at a time when he was taking tentative steps towards a renewed concert and recording ca...Read More
Soprano Carolyn Sampson, counter-tenor Iestyn Davies, and pianist Joseph Middleton gave a lunchtime Prom at the Cadogan Hall which was chamber music of the highest quality. The first half consisted of...Read More
Every time Gustavo Dudamel brings his Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra to London, they get a bit better: once a spirited youth orchestra, they are now grown up, and in technical terms approaching inte...Read More
Bach’s Mass in B minor towers above all other choral works, and it can survive splendidly intact even with blemishes in performance; so it was with this one by Les Arts Florissants under the directi...Read More
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