The Busoni Centenary: Kirill Gerstein and the BBC Chorus in Busoni’s genre-defying Piano Concerto at the Barbican

The centenary of Ferruccio Busoni’s death fell earlier this year, not that ninety-nine per cent of the musical world appears to have noticed. Where are the operas, even his masterpiece…

Fun and games in Vienna: the Guildhall’s Die Fledermaus

Beware the dangers of playing pranks on friends who might nurse their grudges until the right moment presents itself to seek redress. Revenge is after all a dish best served…

Huang Ruo’s M. Butterfly gets its UK premiere

If any Puccini opera can evolve with the times it would probably be his Madama Butterfly. Indeed, it has been widely adapted to film – firstly by Fritz Lang in…

Young Fauré and his masters

Tenor Cyrille Dubois and pianist Tristan Raës are to make Wigmore Hall history in a five-year series of the complete songs of Gabriel Fauré. Dubois will be the first artist…

An engaging evening of fun demonstrating the very real virtues of Gilbert & Sullivan at its best

Gilbert & Sullivan’s Ruddigore presents several challenges, notably the technical one of bringing the ghosts of the ancestors out of their portraits and the more philosophical one of Victorian melodrama.…

ENO’s thought-provoking and sinister Turn of the Screw

Henry James’s 1898 novella expresses far more than the blurred lines arising from ghostly apparitions or the absence of moral absolutes. In Britten’s darkest opera the composer removes some of…

La battaglia di Legnano at Parma’s Verdi Festival gives cause to reflect on the human and animal cost of war

La battaglia di Legnano represents the climax of Verdi’s nationalist, Risorgimento era operas: composed during the period of widespread revolutionary fervour across Italy (and Europe) in 1848, it was premiered…

Tristan and Isolde in San Francisco

In the 1870’s Richard Wagner built a special theater for his operas, a theater where the words of his poems might flow clearly from the stage into the hall. One…

Mahler in extremis: Ferocity and peace from Tilson Thomas and the LSO in the ‘Resurrection’

Sometimes when you listen to performances of the great symphonies – and Mahler’s Second is one of the greatest – your mind turns to other things. This can often be…

Glyndebourne’s hilarious Il turco in Italia

The choice of Il turco in Italia for Glyndebourne in May 2021 might have been made in recognition of its London premiere exactly two centuries earlier in May 1821 at…