Yuja Wang, Royal Festival Hall The elfin Yuja Wang has now reached thirty, so must be judged by grown-up standards. A shame that she ducked out of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata originally billed for ...Read More
IPM roundup 40 Wigmore Hall: Sunwook Kim Oct 25; Alexei Volodin Nov 2; Martha Argerich and Alberto Portugheis December 12; Beatrice Rana Jan 16; Luca Buratto 23 Jan; Barbican: Daniil Trifonov Jan 21; ...Read More
The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century By Timothy Hyman Thames and Hudson 256 pp Ever since Tom Wolfe published his blistering polemic The Painted Word in 1975, it’s been a...Read More
Why should the sound of a consort of four viols be more moving than that of a string quartet? It goes against all logic. With its flat back, and played like a Middle-Eastern spike-fiddle, the v...Read More
The Wigmore Hall is running two Beethoven sonata cycles in tandem, at different speeds: while Igor Levit gets stuck into his cycle, Llyr Williams continues his in a more leisurely arc. And since in Oc...Read More
Words are of limited usefulness in evoking music, but we critics aren’t usually lost for them, so it came as a surprise to find, the morning after the Meshk Ensemble’s performance at the Barbicanâ...Read More
When Dan Crawford established the King’s Head Theatre in 1970, it seemed the sort of venture which might burn brightly for a year or two, then fizzle out like other bright ideas from the Sixties: to...Read More
Ever since Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar made their ground-breaking record East Meets West during London’s first flush of enthusiasm for the sounds of Rajasthan, musicians on both sides of the cla...Read More
Twenty-five-year-old Daniil Trifonov, currently basking in mega-stardom, may not be the best of the young pianists to have recently emerged from the former Soviet bloc – the Uzbek Behzod Abdurai...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