Classical

No black tie, no tea-towels on heads – meet the populisers

The men behind the rise and rise of Opera Holland Park are proud of their diverse repertoire – and their diverse audience. Anna Picard reports

Inside Classical

Wagner, Die Meistersinger von N�rnberg, Glyndebourne Festival Opera (Rated 4/ 5 )

Sunday, 22 May 2011

Some pieces you just have to trust and trust implicitly. When a text is as good as Wagner’s Die Meistersinger it’s a wise director who takes a step back and let the words, the characters, the bountiful score go forth and prosper.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Coliseum, London
Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music, St John's, Smith Square, London

Sunday, 22 May 2011

Shakespeare's romantic comedy becomes almost unrecognisable in this tale of seduction and rejection set in a boys' school

Britten A Midsummer Night’s Dream, English National Opera, London Coliseum (Rated 4/ 5 )

Friday, 20 May 2011

Viruses, it seems, make no distinction between mortals and spirits. Even Fairy Kings can succumb.

Album: Jeremy Polmear, Stephen Stirling, Richard Saxel, Music for Oboe, Horn and Piano (Oboe Classics) (Rated 3/ 5 )

Friday, 20 May 2011

Oboe, horn and piano is a rare but oddly beguiling blend of timbres, albeit a combination mostly avoided by composers, perhaps due to the difficulty resolving the contrasts of instrumental colour and character.

Album: Khatia Buniatishvili, Franz Liszt (Sony Classics) (Rated 3/ 5 )

Friday, 20 May 2011

Buniatishvili has described the piano as "a symbol of musical solitude", a quality apparent in this debut solo recording by the Georgian prodigy.

Album: Tansy Davies, Troubairitz (Nonclassical) (Rated 3/ 5 )

Friday, 20 May 2011

The full range of Tansy Davies's varied modernist interests is displayed on Troubairitz, from the title suite itself, a song-cycle based on 19th-century poems by women troubadours, sung here either a cappella or with minimal accompaniment by Anna Snow, to the more animated pieces such as "Inside Out 2", a brittle bricolage of pizzicato and percussion sounds, and "Grind Show", a musical evocation of a typically bleak, disturbing Goya painting, Pilgrimage of St Isadore, picked out in stalking piano, pizzicato and woodwind.

Hubert Parry - Royal appointment for a radical voice

Friday, 20 May 2011

Hubert Parry composed Jerusalem to support suffragettes not rouse patriots. Jessica Duchen uncovers a misunderstood man

Micaela Carosi's understudy seizes the day

Friday, 20 May 2011

The star falls sick, the understudy takes over and becomes a star: one of the nice things about opera is the way this time-honoured tradition repeats itself year after year. The latest example was when the much-hyped Italian soprano Micaela Carosi suddenly discovered a few days before curtain-up – suddenly? – that her advanced pregnancy would prevent her starring in Covent Garden's Aida.

Lang Lang, Royal Festival Hall

Wednesday, 18 May 2011

Lang Lang has now embarked on his much-trumpeted residency at the Southbank, in which he will perform solo, play chamber music, front his ‘Lang Lang Inspires’ orchestra, and lead children in a massed piano event.

Independent Classical podcast: Opera Holland Park - Michael Volpe and James Clutton

Tuesday, 17 May 2011

Opera Holland Park has gone from being a pleasant summer diversion in one of London's loveliest parks to a series of must-see dates in every opera enthusiast's calendar.

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