CLASSICAL ICONOCLAST

The joy of being in cities like London is that there's so much on, you're spoiled for choice. Last Saturday alone there were 6 diffe...

Ein kahles Mädchen. Heckenblaß entlaubt. Sie steht am Weg, ich gehe weit vorbei. So stehen sie alle Reih' an Reih' ...

At the ENO, there's a new ballet of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring ( read about it in The Times ) Stravinsky's music was revolu...

Sounds interesting, a new book of Hugo von Hofmannsthal writings ed. J D McClatchy. Follow the link to a review in the TLS.

Another photo from the series of Berlin 1959-1964 mentioned below . This was when the Philharmonie site was on the edge, literally, just i...

A view of from the Potsdamerplatz along Stresemannstrasse in 1962, Please follow the link as the man who took this shot has a whole series...

Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex is so dramatic it hardly needs staging. Stravinsky wanted the text in Latin, deliberately distancing the text...

A great Cajun classic by one of the great figures in Cajun music, Nathan Abshire (1913-1981). I had this LP long ago, when I haunted Arhooli...

Why do we go to live recitals? There is much more to live performance than simply sound. On a recording you can get perfection, preserved fo...

How about a quiz? Name some classical repertoire that includes accordion. Wozzeck is the only one that springs to mind but there must be mo...

Sheer indulgence! Marietta's Lied from Die tote Stadt. It's such an immortal piece. The song infuses the whole opera with a kind of...

Public bookings for the Wigmore Hall new season began at midnight but by 0015 some were already sold out. So if you want to hear Angelika...

"To be Macanese", they say, "you have to have a bottle of Balichão in the fridge". In the fridge, note, not necessarily ...

This Royal Opera House production of Thomas Arne's 1762 masterpiece Artaxerxe s is Ultimate Baroque, its magnificence designed to shock...

Ein schwarzer Bock, Ein Besenstock, Die Ofengabel, der Wocken Reißt uns geschwind, Wie Blitz und Wind, Durch sausende Lüfte zum Brocken! Um ...