Classical music

Is Evgeny Kissin, born in Moscow in 1971, the most famous concert pianist in the world? Probably not, if you stretch the definition of ‘concert pianist’ to encompass the circus antics of Lang Lang, the 34-year-old Chinese virtuoso who — in the words of a lesser-known but outstandingly gifted colleague — ‘can play well but chooses not to’. But you could certainly argue that Kissin has been the world’s most enigmatic great pianist since the death of Sviatoslav Richter in 1997 – though, unlike the promiscuously gay Richter, his overwhelming concern with privacy does not conceal any exotic secrets. He has recently married for the first time, but chooses not

Bashing the BBC often becomes a popular blood sport in times of political instability, and especially if the left is weak and un-able to defend itself. You only have to think back to the period when Margaret Thatcher was leading the Tories and lambasting Auntie to recognise that there is some truth in this aphorism. It’s not surprising, then, that we’re going through another phase of repeated attacks on the BBC’s impartiality, the unfair advantage provided by the licence fee, its ‘dumbing down’ to satisfy a broad audience. Those of us who rely on listening to the radio to keep us sane in a mad, mad world need to rally

Herbert von Karajan established the Easter Festival in Salzburg 50 years ago with a production of Die Walküre that is now considered legendary. In the sense that legends are rooted in memory, and mythological in substance, that much is true. Which is not to damn it with faint praise. This revival, staged by Vera Nemirova, was an old-fashioned representation of Wagner and many Wagnerians, having endured too many modern presentations of the Master, who has suffered more than any other composer from the curse of Regietheater, would say that that is No Bad Thing. A giant ash tree, in whose hollowed-out trunk reside Hunding and Sieglinde, was the single, simple

Monteverdi 450 — the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists’ tour of his three operas to 33 cities across two continents — began with his penultimate work Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, at Bristol’s Colston Hall. It was a marvellous occasion, uplifting and entertaining. I hadn’t been to the Colston Hall before, and was most impressed by its acoustics. Apparently it is due to have a £48 million makeover next year (call that £75 million) but it seemed new and with agreeably hard seats which counteracted any tendency the hall’s tropical heat might have to induce drowsiness. The opera was performed in a semi-concert version, which I am more and

The English weren’t the first cowpat composers. Jean-Philippe Rameau raised the art of frolicking in the fields to such heights he filched pastoralism for the French. Rameau’s mastery of landscape is not just a question of orchestral colour, though that’s a large part of it — those goaty oboes, lowing bassoons, cooing flutes transport you straight to the manger. It’s that the very shape of his music, the softly curved lines that slide into burbling ornamentation, follows the contours of the rolling field and riverbank. The glory of his opéra-ballet Les Fêtes d’Hébé (1739) is the final act’s woodland romance that unfurls like a sunrise in the sexy Musette. We

‘Eppur si muove’ — And yet it moves. Galileo’s defiant insistence that the Earth revolves round the Sun, his refusal to submit to the Inquisition, is a familiar one. It’s the battle cry not of a reformer but of a revolutionary, a passionate teller of truths. It’s a credo he shared with composer Claudio Monteverdi. Born barely three years after the astronomer, Monteverdi faced his own inquisition. Defying those who would make music an immoveable sphere, bound in place by harmonic proprieties and structural conventions, he made works that rejected tidy formalism in favour of messy, fleshy humanity. His was music that moved in every sense, that lived as vividly