Live Prom 1, BBC2 From the Independent, 29.8.2020 “We’re in for ninety minutes of heaven, in this Mecca of live music!” This is the first night of the Live Proms, and Katie Derham is in Radio 3 ...Read More
Rule Britannia – and how the Tory media have capitalised on it By Michael Church From the Independent, 26.8.20 You couldn’t make it up. First the chronology. On Sunday, in what seemed like a k...Read More
The First BBC Prom Radio 3 Well, here we are, with the inevitable promotional hype about these Proms-as-never-before. ‘Nothing stops this great festival’ trumpets the presenter, before inviting me...Read More
Classical music in crisis, and the Proms By Michael Church Whither live classical music? When the lockdown was enforced, all concerts were cancelled for the foreseeable future, and musical life...Read More
Last Prom, Royal Albert Hall In the ancient past, four years ago, people going to the Last Prom had a fairly settled sense of how to deal with it. Left-wingers could laugh at the programme’s jingois...Read More
This year’s programme is full of nods to current fads, with the non-classical quota – at least ten of the 83 concerts – creeping steadily up. ‘Multi-genre’ is how the BBC describes this poli...Read More
The Last Prom 2018, Royal Albert Hall The Proms always go out on a high, if you discount the last one whose interest is political rather than musical. In Prom 72, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra...Read More
Jacob Collier and Friends, Royal Albert Hall It goes without saying that 24-year-old Jacob Collier is a phenomenon. There’s no instrument he can’t play, and he sometimes plays several at once. He ...Read More
La traviata, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 2017 La traviata may be one of that small handful of operas which everyone loves, but since the revival of Tom Cairns’s production is turning out to ...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