The Handmaid’s Tale Coliseum, London George Orwell’s 1984 did what no other novel had done before: it predicted the shape of the political world to come. The embodiment of its predictions may have...Read More
Peter Grimes Royal Opera House, London ★★★★★ Michael Church Allan Clayton, John Tomlinson, Bryn Terfel, Jacques Imbrailo, James Gilchrist, John Graham-Hall – and all under the musical dire...Read More
A new concert series (HP Futures); a new venue (St Martin-in-the-Fields has transformed both its subterranean regions and its artistic programme); and a potential new star in the making: what’s not ...Read More
Stephen Jones, the leading authority on Chinese village music, has written a review of Musics Lost and Found which takes my book’s argument further, in many interesting directions… Click here: To ...Read More
SOGHOMON SOGHOMONIAN was born in 1869 in Kütahya, an Armenian Christian enclave whose inhabitants suffered systematic oppression under the Ottoman yoke. Even those Armenians who could speak their anc...Read More
On Saturday 2 October, Radio 3’s Music Matters carried an item in which Tom Service and I discussed, with musical examples, the central argument of my new book Musics Lost and Found: Song Collectors...Read More
Is folk music dying? In my new book I suggest that it is, at least in Europe and North America, thanks to the globalisation, urbanisation, and industrialisation which is now eroding the worldâ€...Read More
Figure St John Passion St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield In medieval times, miracles were often ascribed to the healing power of the priory at St Bartholomew the Great, London’s oldest parish chu...Read More
Yellow Star – Red Star By Agnes Kaposi with László Csősz i2i Publishing £16.95 300pp Agnes Kaposi begins her autobiography with a disarmingly simple statement. ‘I should have had a good start ...Read More
I have just watched John Barber’s youth opera The Selfish Giant at Garsington. And I can’t remember when I last heard a new opera – for any age-group – which gave me such unalloyed pleasur...Read More