CLASSICAL ICONOCLAST

Judith Weir's Miss Fortune starts tonight at the Royal Opera House. She's written many operas in the past, because she's a natu...

It's been a year since the tsunami hit Northern Japan, followed by the emergency at Fukushima. The western news media have moved on, but...

Normally I run miles from stuff like Women in the World, so pious and earnest! Real women are busy getting on with things. But this year An...

Is 19th century French opera having a renaissance? Certainly seems so with so many new performances of Berlioz, Massenet and others  We'...

Walter Braunfels's Jeanne d'Arc, Szenen aus dem Leben der Heiligen Johanna is a much underestimated work. It's eclipsed by the ...

Recently, someone disliked a Bruckner performance so much  that he walked out.  Big fuss in the press. Yet when booers attack Dvořák's ...

This is MAJOR as you'll read in the review below. Rossini's Otello, Ossia il Moro di Venezia live from Opernhaus Zürich, available ...

Anna Prohaska gave a good debut recital tonight at the Wigmore Hall, even though she clearly wasn't well, and had cancelled a concert in...

If you were old enough or young enough in the 1960's you could not have escaped Louie, Louie . It was wilder and more radical than the ...

Strange comments this week about GMSD's Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream at the Barbican on the role of Oberon. Surely those wh...

"Hatred eats the soul of the hater, not that of the hater" - Alice Herz Sommer, who will be 109 in November. She survived Theresi...

Dazzling harlequin optical effects! The Mambo Girl dances for her friends the hottest, hippest kids in town  Later they hang out on cam...

High hopes for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama's  Benjamin Britten A Midummer Night's Dream. Instead of the usual cramped GS...

Fairy tales aren't meant to be "pretty". From the first bars of the overture, Dvořák's music for Rusalka, now at the Roya...

Antonin Dvořák's Rusalka opens tonight at the Royal Opera House. It's the first full staging, though the opera was performed in conc...