classical

Amid the voluminous tributes to the BBC’s late creative director, we ought to point out that Alan Yentob knew nothing about classical music and disliked to be reminded of its existence. Although he once cleared […]

Derek Hartman, 28, has won the 17th international Beethoven piano competition in Vienna. He’s studying for a PhD at Yale and teaching at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. The post An American winner in […]

A Welshman, Tomos Boyles, won the Dudley International Piano Competition 2025 yesterday in the Elgar Concert Hall, University of Birmingham with a performance of Beethoven’s Op.111 and Prokofiev 7th sonata. Tomos takes home £6000 and […]

A German website has been pondering the gender-identity question in Puccini’s ‘shabby little shocker’.   Read on: It operates at the interface between kitsch and art, thus opening the door to camp aesthetics – a […]

The competition has reached its semi-final stage without controversy. Three contestants pulled out and a fourth, Magdalene Ho, was dubiously eliminated after a first round performance in which she showed more character than all the […]

The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra played out their British conductor Daniel Harding after 19 years with a version of the hymn that included snatches of Mahler, Sibelius, Dvorak and Wagner… lovely! You are among the […]

The only man ever to be titled creative director at the BBC, Alan Yentob held editorial control of serious arts on television. Yentob, who has died of oesophigal cancer at the age of 78, made […]

The Santa Monica Symphony has chosen Polish cellist and conductor Pola as its next music director. Pola has been a Dudamel Fellow at the LA Phil. The post Baton charge: Pola warming in California appeared […]

Fiona Maddocks has a ball in The Observer, surveying a weekend in the country. Such a joy to read a music critic who selects adverbs with surgical precision and eschews adverbs like the proverbial pestilence: […]

The brilliant jazz writer and sports journalist Richard Williams discovers a fellow-double-header: I first got to know Philippe Auclair, a Frenchman living in London since 1986, as someone who wrote about football in both French […]