Classical music

In this 200th anniversary of the birth of Mrs C.F. Alexander, author of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, all of us for whom Christmas properly begins when we hear the treble solo of verse one on Christmas Eve should remember her and be thankful. She was born Cecil Frances Humphreys, ‘Fanny’, to a successful land agent in Dublin in 1818, and she seems to have been genuinely mild, obedient, good as He. From an early age she had an instinctive liking for vicars, rectors, deans, bishops and archbishops, although she was shy and at her most relaxed with children and dogs. She eventually married a Church of Ireland rector of

‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ We’ve heard a lot, lately, of the knell that tolls through the opening bars of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, and at Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral it was played on actual church bells. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s percussionist Graham Johns has had a set specially cast, and as he struck them video screens relayed the moment all the way down the cathedral’s length. The orchestra was a one-off, assembled half-and-half from the RLPO and the NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover (the conductor Andrew Manze holds positions in both cities), and this was a major civic occasion, attended by gold chains of all sizes and preceded

The morning after the first night of Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides in May 1995, I received a call from Otto Klemperer’s daughter. ‘Tell me,’ said Lotte, ‘is it true that, in Mr Harwood’s play, the denazification attorney addressed Dr Furtwängler as “Wilhelm”, or even “Willi”?’ I said something in reply about dramatic licence and the interrogator being, erm, an American. ‘No one,’ thundered Lotte Klemperer down the phone, ‘ever called my father “Otto”.’ Appearances meant everything to the generation of great conductors that survived the Nazi era, whether as anxious refugees or, in the case of the Berlin Philharmonic chief, as a cultural poster boy for a criminal regime. After

The lady behind me on Kensington Gore clearly felt that she owed her friend an apology: ‘It’s Bruckner. I don’t know how that happened.’ I felt for her. ‘It’s Nézet-Séguin and the Rotterdam Phil,’ I’d told a succession of my own musical friends. They’d seemed interested. Since the youngish Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin took over at the New York Metropolitan Opera, he’s vaulted on to the A-list, and while the Rotterdam Philharmonic isn’t a super-orchestra, exactly, people do dimly recall that it was conducted by Valery Gergiev, back when that was still something to boast about. So, the inevitable question: what are they playing? And with one word — Bruckner

Looney Tunes was always at its best when soundtracked by a Hungarian gypsy dance. (Watch ‘Pigs in a Polka’ if you don’t believe me.) It’s music that was made to chase small cartoon animals — and terrify conductors. The gunshot syncopations. The hand-break turns in tempi. The banana-skin portamenti and rubato ravines… Musical tripwires everywhere. Nothing to faze conductor Ivan Fischer, however. Last week at the Proms, with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer was giving a guided tour of Hungarian gypsy music and its century-long cohabitation with classical music. It was a masterclass. Without breaking a sweat, he suavely explained the provenance of each piece to the audience, then swung

There’s one big problem with Wagner’s Siegfried, and the clue’s in the name. None of Wagner’s mature works hangs so completely upon a single individual. The character himself isn’t really the issue either, however troublesome he might superficially appear (a ‘randy overgrown schoolboy’, if you believe the misguided programme note for this Usher Hall performance). As so often, confusion falls away once you assume that Wagner — who, after all, wasn’t a complete amateur — knew what he was doing, and take Siegfried as the life-force his creator intended. Someone’s still got to sing the damn role, though, and that’s an Olympian challenge. ‘Most people have never heard a really

I’ve been trying to pinpoint the exact moment when it became impossible to take Mascagni’s Isabeau seriously. It wasn’t when the scenery jammed, leaving half the cast briefly trapped inside a revolving tower. These things happen, after all: you simply suppress thoughts of Spinal Tap and re-suspend disbelief. I don’t think it was the entry of a character called Ubaldo of Edinburgh either, though people were definitely starting to snigger. It wasn’t even the bit when Mascagni, called upon to depict a trotting horse orchestrally, deployed what sounded like a pair of coconut shells. A score that had started as a weak but listenable slice of art-nouveau medievalism descended —

All my life I’ve wanted to compose music, and now I’ve done it. I’ve written a sonata for solo flute that boasts two highly original features; it’s five hours long and must be performed by a badger. Though it took me only five minutes to write, my opus one is guaranteed to get through to the second round of the next competition for new composers sponsored by Sheffield University and the Centre for New Music. That’s because they operate a ‘two ticks’ policy, as the Scottish pianist Philip Sharp — possibly the only classical musician in Britain who calls himself a classical liberal — revealed in his blog earlier this

A young Korean, 22 years old, won the Dublin International Piano Competition last month. Nothing unusual about that. Koreans and Chinese, raised in a school of hard knocks and rounded off in western conservatories, are winning most prizes. A few — like the phenomenal Lauren Zhang who made child’s play of Prokofiev’s second piano concerto in the BBC Young Musician of the Year — are prodigious talents with bright futures ahead. Dublin’s winner Sae Yoon Chon is probably not one of them. His Prokofiev, an effortful shadow of Zhang’s electrification, trundled along at pedestrian pace with one or two stumbles. I was therefore surprised to see that Chon won. I

The picnic hamper’s open, the bubbly is chilled, and country house opera is starting to eat itself. When you arrive at the Wormsley Estate you enter a fantastic, baffling world. Figures in black tie stroll between topiary hedges in obedience to unstated rules, while serving staff hover a few paces behind, gliding silently in to reassert neatness and order. Children dressed in red (they’re from a local Scout group) pop up to help and guide. Then the new production of Die Zauberflöte begins and with a deft, surreal spin, the director Netia Jones bowls it all straight back at you. That’s a big part of the fun here. Jones has

One by one, cathedrals have succumbed to the inevitable. In blazes of publicity, with front-page photographs of girls in cassocks in the cloisters, most deans and chapters have signalled their drive for equality of opportunity by inaugurating a girls’ choir to run alongside the boys’ one. So now, at the vast majority of our cathedrals, instead of boys singing up to eight services per week, the two top lines take turns, in varying ratios, with girls aged from eight to 18. The scheme has been working for 27 years, since Salisbury started the trend in 1991, and let me say from the outset: some of the girls’ top lines are

Apparently it’s called ‘expectation management’. Pollux, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s new work for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, takes its name from Greek myth. But as Salonen explains in his programme note, there’s more: lots more. It’s intended to form a diptych with a second piece called (naturally enough) Castor. It’s also part-inspired by Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, and an image (Salonen compares it to Salvador Dali) of a tree growing out of an ear. And finally there’s a ‘mantra rhythm’, which Salonen heard played by a post-grunge band ‘during dinner in a restaurant in the 11th arrondissement of Paris’, which all sounds very civilised. Still, that’s a lot of concepts for

Salome is my favourite opera by Richard Strauss, the only one where there is no danger, at any point, of his lapsing into good taste, which there is to some degree in all his other operas, even if only momentarily. With Salome, from the opening quiet clarinet slithering upwards, and the luckless young Syrian Narraboth, later in the work to stab himself to death without anyone noticing, remarking for the first of many times how beautiful the princess Salome is tonight, we know we are in for a mischievous orgy of lust and violence. The work’s chromaticism isn’t used to make particular expressive points but to create and sustain an