Journalist, photographer and social commentator.
Boris Godunov M. Mussorgsky Saturday 16 July 2016 Prom 2 Have concert performances of operas become better and more popular over the last decade or have I just learned to appreciate them? The original 1869 version of Mussorgsky’s Boris […]
Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective at Tate Modern (until 30 October 2016) Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1 is still the most expensive work of art by a woman artist sold at auction. It fetched $44.4 million at Sotheby’s in 2014 […]
Year on year you struggle to purchase the tickets to the Chelsea Flower Show. Right? When you’ve finally made it to that most prestigious floral show in the English social calendar, you wish you could crane your neck like a […]
Debussys’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande is based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist play. Let me first establish that symbolist in this context equals mysterious. Most prominent symbols: water and (female) hair. The character of Mélisande remains a mystery throughout and the music […]
Sir Simon Rattle is the London Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director Designate after Valery Gergiev last autumn took his leave of London’s oldest symphony orchestra. I can’t pass a fair judgement on the Russian’s performance, as I was not based in […]
Sir Simon Rattle will this weekend ( 9-10 January 2016) lead the London Symphony Orchestra in a semi-staged performance of Debussy’s only opera Pelléas et Mélisande at the Barbican in London. This is yet another collaborative effort between Rattle and the […]
Sir Simon Rattle has had a second go at recording Sibelius’s symphony cycle. His first attempt in the 1980s with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) resulted in some very decent recordings that have stood the test of time. […]
Recently the Berlin Philharmonic with Sir Simon Rattle at the helm released the complete cycle of Sibelius symphonies. The general level of playing is very high, as you would expect from one of the best orchestras in the world with […]
She has been dead for nearly forty years but there is no stopping her. The last book she wrote was her autobiography which came out posthumously in 1977. As far as I know there are no unpublished gems hiding in […]
MC gangs, a tentative teenage gay love story, a professional sharpshooter, an undercover infiltrator for a secretive police unit, a female detective, a criminal boss with international ties, his young daughter, a pedophile and a host of other more ’ordinary’ […]
BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall, Friday 28 August 2015 prom 57 I have no idea “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall” , but at the Chamber Orchestra of Europe’s recent BBC Proms concert (no.57) the hall was […]
The 104th edition of the Bayreuth Festival has just kicked off with Christian Thielemann conducting Tristan und Isolde. Thielemann was recently appointed as the very first music director of the Bayreuther Festspiele. The opening night saw the usual procession of German celebrities, high nobility […]