John Amis online

After his early days when Debussy and Richard Strauss were considerable influences on his music, especially in the opera Bluebeard’s Castle ...

Catharsis is the word, the release of strong emotions. That definition fits the music of Janacek. Yet until the fifties we knew it not. The ...

Jacqueline du Pré is remembered in the Wigmore Hall by an annual charity concert; this year’s took place on March 9 and was devoted to the m...

First impressions not good; action during the overture; first chorus, stage filled with a bed, nurses, benches, laptops and a woman ironing....

Dulwich College in Town My old school gave its Winter Concert on Monday 30 November in St. John’s Smith Square. As usual, there was a big pa...

“Music is the mediator between intellectual and sensuous life” Beethoven (1810) The prize for the performance of the year should surel...

HANS VAN BÜLOW A life and Times Alan Walker Pp 510, many illustrations price £30 What a man, what a musician, what a life! And what an enthr...

350th Anniversary A celebration of the music of Henry Purcell was held in Westminster Abbey on 28 November (Princess Alexandra was in the au...

Wexford Festival 2009 – late October Emmanuel Chabrier 1841 – 1893 had a short career, has a short list of works but a big reputation with h...

Brahms and Tchaikovsky agreed only on one thing: they both adored Carmen . The new production of Bizet’s evergreen masterpiece at Covent Gar...

FLUTE Richard Adeney Brimstone Press (PO Box 114, Shaftsbury SP7 8XN) £12.50, p.222 If the performance is routine, perhaps with a duff condu...

A musical opinion on the latest production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (October 5) would have to...

LIGETI ’S SCABROUS OPERA The last thing we see in this new production of Ligeti’s opera by English National Opera in the London Coliseum, f...

Traditionally the Devil has all the best tunes, but in Berlioz’ The Damnation of Faust the tenor has some good ones and Marguérite has some...

A Concert of charm, spice and virtuosity St. James in Piccadilly is the only Wren Church built on an original site – consecrated 1684. Wren ...

Bread and Jam Rossini once exclaimed how wonderful opera would be if there were no singers, a thought that came to me forcibly when sitting ...

Professor Barry Cooper in his Prom programme note gives an assessment of his character somewhat different from the usual one of a man irasci...

It is good that music is once more a social affair. Not perhaps to the extent of music-making in the home, as was once the custom. Nowadays ...

Mark Twain once said that a Wagner opera started at six o’clock and when it had been going for two and a half hours your watch said twenty t...

Jolly Good Show Purcell’s The Fairy Queen is usually described as a semi-opera in a Prologue and five acts, libretto by anon, an adaptation...