John Amis online

Which composer would be more insulted by the suggestion that Donizetti was the Lloyd Webber of his day? For in 1840s the Italian composer ha...

The scene is a big, high, bricked, L-shaped space. The printed programme doesn't give the venue a name it but it is in the middle of Sh...

Yes, as you probably heard by now, the owners of Garsington wanted their house back, so the opera had to move and is now opera ting on the G...

Massenet's Fairy Story Jules Massenet held sway in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century, Cendrillion , saw the light ...

The programmes at the Aldeburgh Festival this year (June 10 – 26) were noticeably better and more interesting than the previous two. However...

The late Robert Tear, a wonderful tenor, and sad loss to the music world.

Before Aldeburgh a visit to neighbouring Norfolk, beyond the small town of Beccles , three miles up a dirt road into Toft Monks where is a g...

Maurice Ravel was born within spitting distance of Spain in Ciboure, a seaside village. His mother was a Basque and his Muse frequently cros...

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...