Classical Features
First Person: Robert Hollingworth on I Fagiolini's 'Leonardo - Shaping the Invisible'Friday, 26 April 2019
Leonardo da Vinci died 500 years ago on 2 May this year. We all know he was a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, pioneer of flight and anatomist – yet according to Vasari, Leonardo’s first job outside Florence was as a result of his musical talents. Read more... |
In the spirit of the composer as innovator: Samir Savant on the London Handel FestivalWednesday, 27 March 2019
This is my third year as festival director of the London Handel Festival, an annual celebration of the life and work of composer George Frideric Handel, which takes place every spring in venues across the capital. Read more... |
A Previn treasurySaturday, 02 March 2019
In a way, he was a second Bernstein. Read more... |
Best of 2018: Classical concertsMonday, 31 December 2018
Starry times with the big spectaculars really paid off this year, even if the works performed weren't unusual for London. Pappano's latest Verdi Requiem at the Royal Opera was the classiest perfection imaginable, crowned by the phenomenal Lise Davidsen. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Brno: Czech 100th feted through Janáček and SmetanaSaturday, 08 December 2018
Five of Leoš Janáček's 10 operas are staples of the worldwide repertoire. Two I'd never seen on stage, so the slice I chose of the19-day festival devoted to all of them for the second time in the history of Brno, the cultured Moravian capital where he spent most of his life, tended to the rare and local. Read more... |
First Person Plural: the Calidore String Quartet on music for their torn nationSaturday, 03 November 2018
Classical musicians spend much of their lives inhabiting the realms of the past. To effectively practise and perform the music of Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and countless others, performers must combine research and personal intuition to time travel into the era of these great composers’ lives. Read more... |
Refreshing the sonic spectrum: disability and excellence in British orchestrasThursday, 01 November 2018
Classical music struggles to shrug off the perception of being something of a rarefied world. Or “hermetically sealed” as Charles Hazlewood, founder of the British Paraorchestra describes it. “Classical music has to break out from its ivory tower," says Hazlewood. Read more... |
Like a baton out of hell: Conductors at the 2018 PromsTuesday, 11 September 2018
Discreetly poking his camera through one of the red curtains around the Albert Hall, chief Proms photographer Chris Christodoulou gets the action shots others would kill for. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Suoni dal Golfo Festival - romantics shine in the Bay of PoetsMonday, 03 September 2018
If only Liszt had started at the end of his Byron-inspired opera Sardanapalo. The mass immolation of Assyrian concubines might have been something to compare with the end of Wagner's Götterdämmerung. Instead he only sketched out the first act, complete until nearly the end, and the inevitable comparisons with the Wagner of the late 1840s are not unfavourable by any means. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Lucerne Festival - all-Beethoven and all-Ravel concerts from the greatestWednesday, 29 August 2018
Like the Proms, but over a more concentrated time-span, in a much better concert hall and with a swankier audience paying a good deal more, the Lucerne Festival offers a summer parade of the world's greatest orchestras and conductors night after night. Read more... |
Pages
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 10,000 pieces, we're asking for £3.95 per month or £30 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take an annual subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
inside classical music
latest in today
Edinburgh International Festival 2019: JARV IS
”Cunts Are Still”. Well, that got your attention, didn’t it? Not my words, merely the title of one of JARV IS’s new tracks. In...
CD: Taylor Swift - Lover
If there's a central motif to the sprawling, 18-track opus that is Taylor Swift’s seventh release - and it’s an album...
Edinburgh International Festival 2019: Bach's Multiple...
Puccini's and Abbé Prévost's glitter-seduced...
Appropriate, Donmar Warehouse review - fraught family reunio...
You can’t fail to feel the ghosts in Appropriate: they are there in the very timbers of the ancient Southern...
Prom 46: Kanneh-Mason, CBSO, Gražinytė-Tyla review - brillia...
Let us never tire of singing the praises of the Proms, nor ever take them for granted. For two...
CD: Tanya Tucker - While I'm Livin'
When Johnny Cash and Rick Rubin released the former’s stripped back, soul-bearing American Recordings in 1994 the impact was massive. Not...
Edinburgh International Festival 2019: Breaking the Waves, S...
Love him or hate him, Lars von Trier has time and again made the unpalatable and the improbable real and shatteringly moving in a succession of...
Power, politics and Peaky Blinders - the Shelby family retur...
This is how Steven Knight pictured Peaky...
Bauhaus 100, BBC Four review - a well-made film about the ma...
The Bauhaus school and its subsequent influence make an extraordinary story, and this...