classical music & opera
-
From Boulez to Baker, plus Mahler, Benjamin and... Sting: the conductor on the music that shapes his life on and off the concert platform.
-
From Beethoven to Ex Machina, Mary Shelley to Schubert, the 2,800-year-old myth has amazing longevity. The Aurora Orchestra celebrate its music in a concert this weekend
-
Watch the two singers - who star as Wagner’s ill-fated lovers in ENO’s new production - rehearse the love duet from act two of Tristan and Isolde. Edward Gardner conducts the English National Opera orchestra.
-
Philip Venables proves he’s one of the finest composers around with an intricate score inspired by Kane’s very personal story of clinical depression
-
He cites Hegel as a key influence and compares his music to TS Eliot. The pop-star turned symphonist discusses his plans to bring the first world war’s legacy of ‘mass-mechanised butchery’ to life on stage – without a real person in sight
-
Substantial performance of Oedipus’s birth-to-death story commutes between past and present, staged at a scale to match Enescu’s opera and its humanity
-
James Johnstone plays on an instrument exactly contemporary with this music’s publication
facing the music
-
From Queen to Quincy Jones and Stravinsky to Spamalot, the trumpeter on the music and musicians that inspire her on and off stage
-
The pianist fancies learning the bagpipes, decries his own composing skills and and applauds Ligeti’s, and is very clear that he will never, ever, be found in a karaoke bar
-
-
Comment 'You do not need to be educated to be touched, to be moved and excited by opera'
Graham VickGraham Vick was the keynote speaker at the 2016 Royal Philharmonic Society Awards. This is a transcript of his speech. -
Music of every genre, every culture and every period employs repeated phrases for effect. Why do we love to listen to the same things again and again?
-
you may have missed
-
Michael Güttler has taken over as conductor of Glyndebourne’s Meistersinger with only a few weeks’ notice. How has he approached a mammoth project that most musicians would expect months, if not years, to prepare for?
-
David Bowie was a fan of the ‘world’s worst singer’, but is the epithet a fair one?
-
Eight years ago a teenage Mark Simpson told drag queens in Liverpool he was going to write an opera about them. How does it feel to see his project – Pleasure – finally become a reality on the stage at Opera North?
-
Oedipus finally reaches Britain, there’s a Messiaen marathon in Suffolk, Opera North’s Ring hits the road – and John Luther Adams summons up a deluge
guides
-
Tom Service's survey of the 50 symphonies that changed classical music
-
Tom Service introduces 50 composers from the contemporary classical music scene
-
popular
Topics
- All today's stories
- Opera
- Music festivals
- Festivals
- Glyndebourne
- Royal Opera House
- Richard Wagner
- Sarah Kane
- BBC
- Proms 2016
- English National Opera (ENO)
- Jazz
- Ludwig van Beethoven
- Welsh National Opera
- Opera North
- London Symphony Orchestra
- Florence Foster Jenkins
- Steve Reich
- JS Bach
- Pop and rock
- Europe
First Person Richard Farnes: my austerity Wagner with Opera North