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It is many years since Peter Maxwell Davies gave up control of the St Magnus festival but he continues to hover over it like a proud parent and his music [...]

After enchanting visitors to his Oxfordshire manor with rare Haydn, Rossini and Strauss, Leonard Ingrams ventures this summer into Tchaikovsky. Not the obvious Tchaikovsky - though Cherevichki is known to [...]

There are many sides to Michael Berkeley, but we're going to have to get used to seeing and hearing fewer of them. There's Berkeley the urbane broadcaster, Berkeley the festival [...]

It is the British opera buff's best-kept secret. You buy a cheap Eurostar ticket, you take yourself to Paris for le weekend, you get to see a world-class performance - [...]

Blue Album Orbital Hti Records Phil and Paul Hartnoll, the brothers behind Orbital, have decided to call it quits. This, their last album, is an excellent one: a valedictory reminder [...]

Andrew Clark: I know what you're going to say, Peter. You're going to tell me that today's festival scene is more inclusive than it ever was; that festivals are a [...]

Sofia Gubaidulina - NEW In a major coup, Oxford's chamber-music festival has attracted Gubaidulina as composer-in-residence. Starting with De Profundis for bayan on Friday, her music features in almost every [...]

If you like slow, ritualised theatre, you will be nourished by Harrison Birtwistle's latest contribution to the genre. If not, you will find it repetitive, monotonous and cerebral. I stand [...]

Lang Lang is a musician with no culture. That may seem harsh on a young man who has been lionised around the world, but it is the only conclusion I [...]

Wagner: Gotterdammerung Staatsoper Stuttgart EuroArts (2 DVDs) Anyone interested in The Ring as a parable of human behaviour will find this riveting. The latest Stuttgart production was staged by four [...]

Acis and Galatea - ONE NIGHT ONLY Ivor Bolton conducts the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra in the 1739 version of Handel's first dramatic work in English, with Sophie Daneman as Galatea. [...]

Nowhere does the culture of Pimms, picnics and pashminas seem more unmistakably English than at Grange Park Opera. To get there you have to negotiate a burrow of lanes deep [...]

Call it the curse of The Ring. An internationally renowned director is signed up to stage Wagner's 16-hour tetralogy at the Bayreuth festival. Two years before curtain up - next [...]

The diva is looking every inch thepart. Casually dressed, meticulously made up and dripping gold, Karita Mattila swans into the Royal Opera House with a confident smile and insouciant walk. [...]

Shostakovich: Hamlet Russian Philharmonic/Yablonsky Naxos The music for Grigori Kozintsev's 1964 film of Hamlet underlines what posterity lost when Stalin put an end to Shostakovich's operatic career in 1936. Shostakovich [...]

Mahler's Eighth - TWO NIGHTS ONLY Simon Rattle returns to Birmingham for his first encounter with the 'Symphony of a Thousand', presumably to try it out for size before tackling [...]

When I go to Paris later this month for Richard Strauss's Capriccio, I will be paying even closer attention than usual. I expect to enjoy Renee Fleming's luscious soprano articulating [...]

Uh Huh Her P.J. Harvey Island Don't expect Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, Mark II. The follow-up to P.J. Harvey's Mercury Prize-winning album is a different beast [...]

Die Zauberflote *** Glyndebourne's new Magic Flute is an interpretative wash-out: it's as if former RSC artistic director Adrian Noble has spent seven weeks' rehearsal doing nothing, leaving the singers [...]

The rituals encourage reverence - until you know better. You get ticket confirmation months beforehand, you book your holiday to fit performance dates. You build your day around the 4pm [...]

If, like me, some of your most memorable music festival experiences are related to a strong sense of location, you'll occasionally want to head off the beaten track - to [...]

Thanks to William Christie and his followers, Parisian opera houses have become home to the baroque - so much so that any pre-Mozart repertoire there with modern instruments seems an [...]

David Horne - NEW A new Concerto for Orchestra is Horne's farewell to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra after four years as resident composer. It's part of a fascinating programme [...]

Hovhaness: Cello Concerto Janos Starker/Seattle Symphony Naxos Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000) is a composer I never thought I would find myself espousing. His music always seemed too ponderous to make an [...]

If you have never seen The Magic Flute you better hot-foot it to the Sussex Downs. For once, you will get the story told with picture-book clarity. There's a dancing [...]

Over the past 20 years there have been surprises aplenty as William Christie and his followers opened up the neglected splendours of Lully, Rameau and Charpentier. None has been quite [...]

Terri Lyne Carrington Structure ACT Drummer Carrington's latest release, featuring Greg Osby on alto saxophone, is as austere as its title. Carrington's trademark aggression and mature, fusion-steeped technique is tempered [...]

La Traviata - NEW Can Tugan Sokhiev, Welsh National Opera's young music director, conduct Verdi as well as he does Tchaikovsky? Alexia Cousin, a fine young French soprano, makes her [...]

Three pug dogs snort and sniff, occasionally settling on the grass. There are ducks on the driveway, hens in the backyard, lambs over the fence. Sir George and Mary Christie [...]

A Grand Don't Come for Free The Streets 679 Recordings Anyone with an anthropological interest in British youth will find much to get their teeth into on the Streets' second [...]

A bold experimentin commercial opera has collapsed, less than a month after it started. London's Savoy Opera, run by impresario Raymond Gubbay, will stop trading when its productions of The [...]

The pre-launch publicity was sensational, reviews were mixed - and the audiences were never really there. As the opera world picks over the collapse of Raymond Gubbay's Savoy Opera, many [...]

In his Sixth Symphony, Prokofiev confronts issues of life and death, good and evil, messing his hands elbow-deep in the fading horrors and forlorn hopes of this world. In the [...]

Scottish Opera is bleedingto death. Its income is barely enough to coveroverheads. The banks have cancelled itsborrowing facility. It cannot announce a programme for 2004-05 or sign contracts for future [...]

Moniuszko: The Haunted Manor Polish National Opera / Jacek Kaspszyk EMI (2 CDs) Released to coincide with the Polish National Opera's first visit to London, this is a timely reminder [...]

Luciano Berio **** The South Bank's celebration of Berio's life and work gets into its stride tomorrow evening with two unmissable events: the first screening of a film interview with [...]

Savoy Opera - NEW Can Raymond Gubbay's new, unsubsidised, company fill the 1,000-seat Savoy Theatre eight times a week for the best part of a year? The Barber of Seville [...]

Puccini Discoveries Soloists/Riccardo Chailly Decca These off-cuts from the master's table, mostly premiere recordings, range from Puccini's earliest surviving composition to an extract from his last work. None is a [...]

For Jennifer Higdon, life is a dream. 'I'mworried that I'll wake up and all this won't have happened,' she laughs, her twangy voice betraying her roots in the American south. [...]

Twenty-five years ago, eastern Europe lay under the grip of Communism and artists in the 'free' world wished to react against that fact. Music was a language shared by both [...]

How good an opera composer was Dvorak? As a member of the Provisional Theatre orchestra in Prague, much of his early experience lay in opera, and with 10 titles to [...]

With some American sopranos, size is an issue. With others, all that counts is voice and personality. When Christine Brewer arrives on stage, what you notice is not that she [...]

Full Moon in Paris Dir: Eric Rohmer, 1984 Arrow A typically oblique and ironic look at modern social mores from the masterful Eric Rohmer, Full Moon in Paris acquired an [...]

Haitink at 75 - TWO NIGHTS ONLY The Barbican is making a song and dance out of the Dutch conductor's 75th birthday - with good reason. The celebrations begin this [...]

He will engage you or enrage you, but he won't leave much room in between. That's Richard Jones. And yet the tall, lean 50-year-old sitting in front of me in [...]

The renovated Sadler's Wells has proved a boon not just to touring companies eager to fly their flags in London, but to metropolitan audiences hungry for variety of repertoire and [...]

JanAcek: Orchestral Music Czech Philharmonic / Charles Mackerras Supraphon (2 CDs) Mackerras would never claim to have the last word on Janacek, but these performances - the product of the [...]

The Rhinegold ** English National Opera's first stab at The Ring for 30 years is poorly thought through and musically undistinguished. Phyllida Lloyd's superficial staging portrays Wagner's gods as shady [...]

When Richard Wagner was casting around for a tenor to create the role of Tristan, he went to Karlsruhe to hear Ludwig Schnorr, fearing that 'the grotesqueness of his figure [...]

Ranging from the ethereal clouds of Debussy's Nocturnesto the UK premiere of Poul Ruders's Listening Earth, this programme added up to a powerful theme with variations - the theme being [...]