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Classical music & opera

  • Review
    Don Giovanni, Glyndebourne – obsession, distress and danger in uneven new production

  • Review
    Wozzeck, Royal Opera House – Gerhaher’s victim shuffles towards disaster in nuanced staging

    Deborah Warner’s focused and vivid new production avoids caricature, and, with superb singing and Antonio Pappano’s conducting, drama and music dovetail perfectly

  • Turbocharge philanthropy, conga to Beethoven, ditch the ukuleles:
    10 ways to save classical music

    After cuts by Arts Council England and the BBC, Simon Rattle says UK opera houses and orchestras have never faced greater peril. How can they fight back? Top musicians outline their battle plans

Live reviews

  • The week in classical: The Pearl Fishers; Takács Quartet – review

    • Emanuel Ax review – quicksilver agility and a model of good musical sense

    • Carmen review – a true-crime thriller with an uneasy heroine

    • BCMG/Wendeberg review – ‘arborescent’ choral work celebrates Birmingham’s 100,000 new trees

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

Album reviews

  • Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde review – Gerhaher and Beczała give late masterpiece new life

  • Classical home listening: Carl Nielsen: The Symphonies; Alex Paxton’s Happy Music for Orchestra

  • Brahms By Arrangement Vol Two: Orchestrations by Robin Holloway review – dialogue with the past brings present benefits

  • Classical home listening: coronation anthems; Christopher Purves’s My Soul, What Fear You?

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

People

  • Obituary
    Nicholas Snowman

  • Obituary
    Christopher Nupen

  • ‘I was swallowing the piano whole’
    Stephen Hough on life as a prodigy – and playing for Jimmy Savile

  • Russian violinist Ilya Gringolts
    ‘I know people who support the war. They keep their mouths shut’

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

You may have missed

  • ‘Like sex and religion, we don’t like to talk about memory’
    Pianist Angela Hewitt on how she keeps hers in shape

  • ‘It takes a community to develop a musician’
    The Royal Philharmonic Society’s John Gilhooly

  • Charlotte Higgins

    If we defund opera saying it is for toffs, then only the toffs will go. Where’s the sense in that?

    Charlotte Higgins

  • Tár’s gender-balanced profession is a utopian fantasy. In the real world, conducting has a gender problem

    Emma Warren
Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

Guides

  • Know the score
    Without Ethel Smyth and classical music's forgotten women, we only tell half the story

    Leah Broad

  • The best classical music works of the 21st century

  • A guide to contemporary classical music

  • A musical tour of Europe
    Stephen Moss's guide to the music of Europe's great cities: Berlin

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

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