Journalist, photographer and social commentator.
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 […]
¨How can you fail with Tosca? … If you fail with Tosca, then there is something incredibly wrong¨, Sir Bryn Terfel told me recently. The Welsh bass-baritone is currently performing at Royal Opera Covent Garden in Jonathan Kent’s revived staging […]
An intoxicated man dressed in a white suit, wearing a panama hat enters during the ouverture. He announces that ‘Love is like Death’. I’m not sure who he is quoting, but it’s not Nietzsche, who apparently saw the opera at […]
PROM 61 Thomas Ades, Anton Bruckner, Sir Simon Rattle, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra Sir Simon Rattle knows Anton Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony like the back of his hand. He had no need for a score when he conducted the work with […]
PROM 56 Sunday 1 September Berliner Philharmoniker Kirill Petrenko Anton Bruckner’s grandiose symphonies are not everybody’s cup of Grüner Veltliner. Even now, almost 150 years since the Austrian composer wrote his Fifth Symphony, there will be people – maybe even […]
For the first time the combined forces of the Royal College of Music and the Sibelius Academy (Finland) amassed on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall. To debut in front of 5000 people must be quite a daunting experience, […]
PROM 56 2024 BRUCKNER Os Justi, Locus iste, Christus factus est, Symphony No.5 in B flat major A visit by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to the BBC Proms is guaranteed to be one of the festival’s highlights. I think their […]
Prom 14, July 2024 will be recorded in the annals as the Yunchan Lim Prom. With the Royal Albert Hall packed to the acoustic mushroom rafters, the noise welcoming the South Korean pianist sensation was nothing short of tumultuous. In […]