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
Orfeo/Cosi fan tutte Garsington Opera, Wormsley The director and designer of Garsington’s new Orfeo – John Caird and Robert Jones – invite their audience to get involved in the ‘immersive arti...Read More
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