John Amis online

WIERD AND WONDERFUL News from the Var Can you imagine anything stranger than a string quartet transcription of Mozart’s Requiem , K. 626? Pe...

If Socrates had been in my seat at Glyndebourne on 18 August it is possible that he might, as was his wont, have wanted to ask a few questio...

Born Melbourne 1913, Australian, but not always proud of it. Latterly added an e to her name( it helped her career somewhat). Brown was a fr...

Richard Strauss once said that he couldn't write about Mozart; he could only worship him but in 1931 he made an edition of one of his go...

Richard Strauss’s last fling at opera was premiered in the dark time in 1942 in Munich, when Germany was in distress and was still causing d...

Covent Garden is on a high forgetting the daft Aida there have been three outright winners in Turco in Italia , La Fille du Regiment and n...

New photograph of John for his 88th birthday.

“Shabby little shocker” was the famous put-down by an American critic, a view not shared by the thousands that enjoy Puccini’s Tosca every ...

Prokofiev was thirty when his opera The Love for Three Oranges was premiered in Chicago at the end of 1931. So it was not the youngest Prkf...

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....