John Amis online

Roger Nicholls Yale, 430 pp Our foremost expert on French music in general and Ravel in particular, here has written a third book on the com...

A vast crowd besieged Westminster Abbey on February 15 for a service of thanksgiving for the life of Dame Joan Sutherland, La Stupenda . Rec...

TOMLINSON A GREAT GURNEMANZ Nikolaus Lehndorff's production of Wagner's Tristan , twice at Glyndebourne, was such a highlight, winni...

Like most people, I suppose, I get tunes on the brain, usually for a short time. Unusually, however, I have had one tune on the brain for ov...

Tony Scotland has written a whopper of a biography of Lennox and Freda (Berkeley of that ilk). What makes it so expansive (575 pp) and exp...

Pope's Daughter loves son Difficult not to raise an eyebrow or two when the name of Lucrezia Borgia comes up, recalling naughty things: ...

PIERS AND WITHOUT PEERS Piers Lane is surely at the zenith of his career. The Australian is an artist and a virtuoso as well, provides all t...

The next day in the Queen's Elizabeth Hall the Takacs, resident string quartet on the South Bank, gave one of their regular concerts in ...

AN ANCIENT MARRINER RETURNS Forty, fifty years ago, Neville Marriner and his Academy of St. Martin's were a constant on our musical scen...

Aimez-vous Prokofiev? Reader, do you find nowadays that some folk like everything that the famous composers write, a blanket hurrah for ever...

A Tenor Chairman Wagner tinkered with Tannhäuser after its premiere in 1845, making a new version in 1861 with subsequent emendations as lat...

Since Shura Cherkassky frisked about the keyboard in his eighties we are used to golden oldies and we hear that Methusaleh has booked the Wi...

A Hero’s Baton The programme of the Philharmonia’s concert in the Festival Hall, December 9, looked as if it was put together by a committee...

It was born the Goldsborough Orchestra in 1948 and re-christened the English Chamber Orchestra in 1960; the finest hours of its distinguishe...

A Fine Piano Recital It is always a particular pleasure when an artist one has watched growing, achieves mastery. I knew Leon McCauley firs...

A Fringe Benefit Returns Cilea’s 1904 opera Adriana Lecouvreur was seen again 22 November, forsaking her 18th century Comédie Française sta...

Operatic Rarities One for the head, one for the heart and one for fun seems to have been the watch word for Wexford for the last few decades...

Bliss was it Some like concerts by orchestra, some choral, others opera but for many of us a good concert by a string quartet is our idea of...

It is usually a sinister portent when there is stage business during the overture. So it proved on November 6, London Coliseum, for English ...

A Conductor for All Seasons Charles Mackerras was a conductor for all seasons, certainly for four centuries of music, his range was extraord...