classical music & opera
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Marius de Vries joins as creative consultant to help new artistic director develop projects away from traditional opera
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This year’s highlights include series of intimate shows by the rock band and a pioneering piece of music theatre
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The first ever UK Live Music Census is surveying a day’s worth of live music across the country. In a digital world with ever more ways to listen, is being there still the biggest thrill?
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Lost for 150 years – and mistaken for her brother’s after that – some of Fanny Mendelssohn’s bold, complex music is belatedly receiving the attention it merits. Her great-great-great granddaughter tells the story
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Ardent and joyful love between composer and tenor is revealed in exhibition marking 50th anniversary of Sexual Offences Act
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Comment We need more women composers – and it's not about tokenism, it's about talent
Susanna EastburnWhy are female composers not taken as seriously as their male counterparts? Sound and Music, the national development organisation for new music, are determined to do something about it
facing the music
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From a teenage obsession with Wagner to the inspirational Giulini and the daily necessity of Bach, the conductor shares his musical passions
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From Bach to Bacharach, and Björk and George Benjamin, the composer tells us about the music and musicians that inspire her
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weekly from the archive
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9 March 1971: Meirion Bowen on the scholar, virtuosic musician and crumhorn whizzkid at the forefront of the period-instrument movement, who died tragically young 40 years ago
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From the archive, 23 April 1827: Following the death of Beethoven, the Observer publishes a personal account of the eccentric and prodigiously talented composer
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From the archive, 11 August 1876: The Guardian reports from the very first Bayreuth Wagner festival, presided over by the composer himself.
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Hamburg’s new world-class public venue trumpets its host city to the world. London is already a beacon, and doesn’t need Simon Rattle’s dream hall in quite the same way
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Did deafness liberate him? Was his African ancestry suppressed? Did he write a musical communist manifesto? A new show in Paris celebrates – and debunks – the many myths surrounding Beethoven
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you may have missed
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He is renowned for writing politically controversial operas, so what will Adams make of the new US president? On his 70th-birthday tour, the composer talks beatniks, bombs and Trumping Nixon
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Opera North’s new approach to Wagner was praised for its dramatic power, musical integrity and accessibility. You can watch the first act of Die Walküre here
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Operatic tenor with a heaven-sent voice who was a favourite of international audiences for more than 40 years
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It’s 225 years since Mozart’s death, and there’s a giant CD collection to mark it featuring many of the biggest names in classical music. We asked some of them to reveal which of his works they love best
guides
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Tom Service introduces 50 composers from the contemporary classical music scene
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Our series ends in Berlin, the classical music lover’s dream destination, with Berg, Busoni, Bowie and Bernstein.
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Tom Service's survey of the 50 symphonies that changed classical music
most viewed
Feature Sisters doing it for themselves: radical motets from a 16th-century nunnery