John Amis online

200 Alleynians lustily singing the Gershwin indestructible tunes of Porgy and Bess was thrilling, heart-warming and mind-blowing. No doubt ...

Alice Sara Ott gave a piano recital on November 22 in Queen Elizabeth Hall. There was nothing unusual about the programme: Mozart late varia...

Having been a music critic for more than sixty years perhaps it is time to spill a bean or two. My first bean is dated 1951 when I was not o...

To Parson's Green, SW6, to talk to my favourite baritone, not only mine but everybody's who has had the luck to hear him. His is not...

Onegin at the Coliseum Eugeny/Eugene Onègin stands out amongst the operas of Tchaikovsky; none of the others have so securely captured the h...

On October 24 the English Opera Company at the Coliseum ventured for the first time into the world of French baroque opera with a run of Ram...

TWO WINNERS, ONE ALSO RAN The Wexford Opera Festival has since 1951 been famous for its championing of works rare and neglected. It was star...

Malcolm Arnold's 90th birthday was celebrated October 21 – 23 in the Royal Derngate Concert Hall in Northampton, his birthplace. This wa...

Do you live near a cinema that shows the New York Metropolitan opera performances? They are £25 a go and worth your consideration. I saw Wal...

But one that did not contain a note of any of the Strauss family and began with Johann Sebastian Bach! However, it did contain two numbers b...

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...