Maurizio Pollini, Royal Festival Hall, London Maurizio Pollini was, in his prime, arguably the greatest pianist in the world. In recent years there’s been a falling-off from his once immaculate ...Read More
Musics can die… I was born in Conwy, a fishing village in north Wales, and many of my earliest memories are of singing. The Second World War was at its darkest hour, and my father was fighting in Fr...Read More
Composer, belle-lettrist, polemicist, novelist, painter, teacher, and failed priest – as well as pianist – the newly-knighted Stephen Hough must sometimes lose track of his multifarious ac...Read More
The Magic Flute Royal Opera House, London There are a few opera productions which never grow stale, they just get better, and so it is with director David McVicar’s version of The Magic Flute. It wa...Read More
Lars Vogt remembered, By Michael Church Can one play vibrato on the piano? Since it’s just a box of hammers, with each making only momentary contact with its string, the common-sense answer m...Read More
It’s an ill wind… Temporarily prevented from performing in Verbier by tendonitis in his left shoulder, Evgeny Kissin suddenly has time on his hands, and is in a mood, I’m told, to give an interv...Read More
Orchestral Music of Afghanistan Afghan soloists plus the Oxford Philharmonic EartH, Hackney [the capitalised H is correct] Qur’an scholars will never agree on the vexed question of whether the enjoy...Read More
Alcina Glyndebourne Festival Opera, West Sussex ★★★★★ In Francesco Micheli’s new production of Handel’s Alcina, the lights go up on a little family whose dysfunctional demeanour sugg...Read More
Madama Butterfly Royal Opera House, London, ★★★★ Nobody could accuse Covent Garden of backwardness in virtue-signalling. They recently announced plans for trigger-warnings when murder, rape, a...Read More
La bohème Glyndebourne Festival Opera, ★★★★ It seems to matter more to Floris Visser that an audience should recognise his personal imprint, than whether he’s served a work as it d...Read More