John Amis online

Engaging a director and a set designer to make their operatic débuts at Glyndebourne sounds like folly; and when that opera is as difficult ...

Grandest of the grand Rossini said: “Nobody is capable of writing grand opera except Verdi”: and Aida is the grandest of the lot. Intended ...

Myaskovsky, Copland and Liszt Thats not a bad harvest for the latter half of a single week in London April 29, 30 and May 1, the middle symp...

Somehow the Wigmore Hall atmosphere is always sympathatic during the annual Ferrier Awards, people come every year and there is friendly sup...

Prodigies? Well, there’s Mozart of course, Mendelssohn challenging Shakespeare, Saint-Saéns with 32 sonatas under his pianistic belt, the in...

Still a Modern Pioneer Of famous composers only Webern left fewer compositions, just twelve, all played during a mini-festival devoted to Ed...

He was a lad in his early teens when I first met Julian Bream. He was born in Battersea and he sounded like it; he kept his cockney accent a...

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...