Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s performance of eighteen Ligeti Etudes at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on May 12 – faster than ever, and negotiating without missing a beat the collapse of several loos...Read More
Chineke! Queen Elizabeth Hall Over the last half-century the outbuildings of the Royal Festival Hall have been threatened with one grandiose makeover after another: people have always been ambi...Read More
Opera moves with the times: it’s no surprise that a Carmen in tune with the #metoo movement should open in Florence, with the exasperated heroine shooting her jealous lover dead. But that’s...Read More
Drum children There’s a felicitous double meaning in Kodo, the name of the celebrated Japanese drumming ensemble. Its written characters mean ‘drum child’, but an infinitesimally different...Read More
‘If I were a gambler,’ I wrote in The Independent seventeen years ago, ‘I’d put serious money on a 23-year-old Russian mezzo who will make her discreet solo UK debut in a Suffolk church...Read More
Emerging from a rare sabbatical, Evgeny Kissin – the world’s most acclaimed classical pianist – has just published his autobiography. He has also just married a childhood friend, and he’s ...Read More
‘If there’s no blood, there’s no entertainment,’ shouts Netia Jones, as her Puck catapults himself high into the air, and lands with a sickening thump on the rehearsal room floor. ‘Gosh – ...Read More
“WE LEFT our native land thinking we carried no baggage, completely unaware of the biggest gift our country had bestowed on us: the gift of music.” So said Basel Rajoub, a Syrian composer and saxo...Read More
Japan’s Westernisation is only skin-deep. For musical proof of this, consider the eagerness with which the Japanese periodically forsake their hi-tech existence, and immerse themselves in their anci...Read More
Out, brief candle! As life nears its end, thoughts can acquire urgent clarity. This truth may not be particularly perceptible in literature, because novelists find endless ways of disguising it. But i...Read More