Barbican, LondonNot content with taking charge of Covent Garden's current starry run of performances of Verdi's Don Carlo, Antonio Pappano nipped over to Italy at the start of this week to conduct the London Symphony ...
GlyndebourneKatharina Thoma's annoying Glyndebourne production of Ariadne auf Naxos relocates Strauss's elusive opera about opera to a British country house during the second world war. The transposition derives from ...
Polly Morland's study of bravery is executed with energy, curiosity – and courageYou might think an inquiry into the nature of courage a trumped-up excuse for a book but Polly Morland loses no time in persuading you ...
Anger as the price of seats for the sold-out Doctor Who concerts go through the roofThe Proms have been described by Czech conductor Jiri Belohlavek as the world's largest and most democratic music festival. Running over ...
Susanne Heinrich (bass viol) (Dagamba)It's so difficult playing Bach's solo music on a bass viol, writes Susanne Heinrich merrily, that "it is unlikely to start a trend". Obsessed with the six violin sonatas and partitas ...
Coliseum, London; Barbican, LondonAt the end of ENO's new staging of Wozzeck, the last thing you feel like doing is clapping. Carrie Cracknell's powerful production asks for silence; time to absorb the ...
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Karajan (ICA Classics) (2 CDs)Richard Osborne's excellent liner notes tell us that Neville Cardus wrote in the Guardian that a "raving" audience filled the Royal Festival Hall on ...
Cappella Mediterranea, Chamber Choir of Namur, Clematis/Alarcón (Ricercar)This exuberant collection brings together secular and sacred Spanish music that might have been exported to the new world in the 17th ...
Robert Schumann's tragic life has long coloured our view of his music. But as pianist Jonathan Biss concludes a year long series of concerts, he finds a composer betrayed by his biographyFor most of the century and a ...
'I told my wife I thought I could be a great composer. Understandably, she thought I was deluded. I couldn't even read music, let alone write it'I grew up being told I had all the musicality of a brick. ...