Fiona’s top 10 of 2024
The Observer music critic Fiona Maddocks rates Death in Venice as her signature opera experience of the year. Read her full rankings here. There is stgill time to add your top 3 to the Slippedisc […]
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The new Lebrecht Interviews: Itzhak, Mirga and the Janacek cyclist
Over the hoplidays this week, BBC Radio 3 is running three new Lebrecht Interviews with leading figures in thee music world. Two are notoriously elusive. This is, I am told, the first programme-length interview Itzhak […]
Vintage shot: Telling a conductor what he’s worth
This is the forbidding Erich Leinsdorf, conducting the LA Phil in the 1980s. When he wasn’t looking, someone put the sign up and oboist David Weiss snapped this shot. Leinsdorf was not renowned for having […]
Britain’s busiest classical producer?
Tip a hat to Grammy-nominated Brian Pidgeon who is, we think, the most prolific record producer in the UK. Brian has made around 400 recordings. He was Simon Rattle’s first record producer with the Merseyside […]
Can Gergiev still do Mahler?
Early in his international career, Valery Gergiev professed himself a Mahler enthusiast and conducted the symphonies with great engagement whenever he got the opportunity. For the past three years, as a Putin collaborator, he has […]
Jerrold Northrop Moore: How I got in touch with Elgar
The composer’s great biographer, who died this year, gave a wonderfully colourful interview some years back to the Elgar Society. It’s Jerry at his most discursive, remembering the most minute details of his quest. I […]
Minnesota concertmaster, RIP
The death has been made known of Lea Foli, concertmaster of the Winnipeg Symphony from 1960 and of the Minnesota Orchestra from 1969 to 1988. He was 91. Lea Foli was also a faculty member […]
Ravel expert, RIP
The French musicologist and broadcaster Marcel Marnat has died at the age of 91. He was the author of the impressive 1985 Fayard biography of Maurice Ravel, and he was head of France Musique from […]
The international competition where only Koreans get prizes
The results are in for the 2024 Seoul International Piano Competition, sponsored by LG. All six prize winners are Korean. We checked the results of the last competition, in 2020. Guess what? All six prizewinners […]
China’s sax king dies at 64
Known as the man who ‘gave saxophone a voice in China’, Liu Yuan died of cancer yesterday aged 64. Among other achievements, he founded China’s first rock band and mentored dozens of young talents. The […]
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