Journalist, photographer and social commentator.
Richard Strauss’ Elektra is a brutal opera. The title role requires a dramatic soprano to maintain total control across her entire range, from low A to high C. While navigating the rapidly descending and ascending vocal lines, she must […]
Berliner Philharmoniker recordings · Kirill Petrenko · Arnold Schoenberg 3 CD / 1 Blu-ray Disc The Berlin Philharmoniker, under the direction of Chief Conductor Kirill Petrenko, presents a box set of live recordings featuring some of Schönberg’s most ‘beloved’ works, including […]
The Vienna Philharmonic are regular guests at BBC Proms, and during their visits audiences expect to hear at least one quintessentially Viennese work. On their first night we were treated to Bruckner’s magnificent (unfinished) Symphony No.9, premiered in 1903 in […]
Yam Awely 1995, Emily-Kam-Kngwarray-acrylic paint on canvas, 152 × 490 Tate Modern’s presentation of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s batiks and acrylic paintings – 29 years after her death – is the first large-scale exhibition of her work by a major European […]
Is Duke Bluebeard’s Castle a tale of external or internal events? ¨Where is the stage: within, or outside you ?¨ asks the Bard in the prologue to Bluebeard’s Castle. Iván Fischer, the founder and conductor of the Budapest Festival Orchestra […]
¨Franco Zeffirelli spoke with the animals. He spoke with the geese and was convinced he’d trained them. Only later did he learn that they actually understood the music – and knew exactly when to make their entrance¨. So says Cecilia […]
To put on a production of Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (1689 ) presents several challenges right from the outset. First, the musical sources are fragmentary. The earliest surviving scores date from 1775 or later and they lack enough […]
Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades – or Pique Dame – was the last opera Stalin attended. Though he had some appreciation for classical music – as depicted in The Death of Stalin – he was never particularly fond of opera. […]
Ukraine features almost on a daily basis on our digital front pages. In the Russo-Ukrainian war Western sympathy clearly lies with the underdog: Ukraine. Yet Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa (1883), inspired by Pushkin’s poem Poltava, portrays the Ukrainian leader of the […]
Intertwined in a lover’s knot – or a leggy pretzel – the nubile Deianira is seen smooching a well–fit Hercules in Hercules and Deianira (1517) by Jan Gossaert. In Giovanni Bellini’s St Jerome in the Wilderness (1460) the patron saint […]
The painter and art theorist Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627 -1678) is largely forgotten. During his lifetime he was in demand in Holland, at the Emperor’s Court in Vienna and the upper echelons of London society. He was thought of as […]
The group of French painters rejected by the official Salon was initially referred to as intransigents. It was the playwright and critic Louis Leroy who coined the term impressionist in his derisive review of their first independent exhibition, titled The […]