CLASSICAL ICONOCLAST

New Year New Music! Hooray for BBC Radio 3 starting 2016 with a celebration of Karlheinz Stockhausen!  The party started on New Year...

Luciano Berio, right,  with Schubert.  An apt point on which to start discussing Berio's Sinfonia (1968), a key work of modern times....

Japanese Americans celebrating New Year's Eve, 1944-45. Out with the old year, in with the new. Everyone's dressed up, looking g...

From BR Klassik, a video of a recital by Florian Boesch and Martin Martineau .  It's a superb performance, of course, but it's a...

Tse Lo lin (紫羅蓮) died this week aged 90.  Song of Malaya (馬來亞之戀) (1954) was one of her most famous movies, for which she also wrote the...

London might be shut down for the season but there's plenty to listen to elsewhere. Kurt Masur conducts the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orc...

One hundred years ago today, the "ChristmasTruce" when both sides in the trenches stopped fighting, for a while. The event of...

What's with this "War on Christmas" business?  If  your faith is so weak that it's threatened by what other people do o...

At this time of the year the transport system closes down - cancellations, roadworks, traffic jams, possible bad weather, insane crowds i...

Kurt Masur has died, aged 88. Masur was much, much more than a conductor. He transformed his city, his nation and the world. Would Ger...

Courtesy of a friend, vintage greetings from a happy surveillance society! And why Stalin ? Because he used Lenin as a front, like the k...

Plans for a new, world-class concert hall for London reach a further stage, with the approval of funds for a more detailed business plan...

Robert Schumann Das Paradies und die Peri   (Op 59 1843) in a recent performance from Paris on BBC Radio 3 (starts around 12 mins). T...