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The Guardian - Back to homeThe Guardian

Classical music & opera

  • (WOMAN) Ema Nikolovska (LOVER 2) Cameron Shahbazi (LOVER 1) Beate Mordal ROH Picture a day like this 2023 ? Camilla Greenwell 7145-BW

    Review
    Picture a day like this – Benjamin’s modern fairytale of sparse and moving beauty

  • Vi?kingur O?lafsson- Bach’s Goldberg Variations - 22-09-23 Credit- Pete Woodhead-8

    Review
    Víkingur ?lafsson – Icelandic pianist brings magic and spontaneity to Bach

    Performing the Goldberg Variations to a packed and tangibly engaged hall, this was a hypnotic reading that added up to considerably more than the sum of the work’s 32 parts.
  • Rose Knox-Peebles as Erda in the Royal Opera House’s production of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold

    News
    Opera actor, 82, furious with critic for saying she looked a fright on first night

    ‘The “fright” look is all naturally mine,’ riposted Rose Knox-Peebles after FT reviewer assumed she had makeup on in Das Rheingold

Live reviews

  • Henry Waddington (centre) as Falstaff at Opera North

    Falstaff review – Opera North puts a twinkle in Sir John’s eye in gleeful – and green – staging

    • Sinfonia Cymru review – US female composers shine under Vale of Glamorgan festival spotlight

    • Marc-André Hamelin review – pianist rises to the extreme challenges of Ives’s Concord Sonata

    • Hallé/Elder review – enthralling vision of Mahler’s ninth

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

Album reviews

  • Full-sized … the Philharmonia Zurich.

    Villa-Lobos: Suite Floresta do Amazonas review – a hymn to the abundance of the rainforest

  • Tarek Elazhary and Tamsin Elliott seated on a staircase with an accordion and a harp

    Tamsin Elliott & Tarek Elazhary: So Far We Have Come review – an Anglo-Egyptian meeting of minds

  • the four players of the Cuarteto Quiroga wearing black, against a black background, holding their instruments while turning to each other and smiling

    Classical home listening: Mozart and CPE Bach from the Dunedin Consort; Cuarteto Quiroga’s Atomos

  • conductor John Wilson

    Rodgers and Hammerstein: Oklahoma! review – Oh, What a Beautiful Recording

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

People

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

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  • One Hundred Metronomes, Buffalo, New York, USA<br>Please contact your Account Representative for licensing use on merchandise and/or resale products; fine art prints, wall décor, gallery, nonprofit or museum displays. Mandatory Credit: Photo by Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock (12487084a) 100 metronomes wound up for performance of Ligeti Poeme Symphonique, Buffalo Arts Festival, Albright-Knox Gallery One Hundred Metronomes, Buffalo, New York, USA

    Gy?rgy Ligeti
    How?he soundtracked 2001, inspired Radiohead and composed music like ‘a knife through Stalin’s heart’

  • Prom 1 14 july 2023 BBC Symphony Orchestra and Dalia Stasevska

    Come together
    The?democracy of the symphony – music’s greatest form?

  • classical music composite

    Turbocharge philanthropy, conga to Beethoven, ditch the ukuleles:
    10?ways to save classical music

  • Leporello (Mikhail Timoshenko), Don Giovanni (Andrey Zhilikhovsky) and The Commendatore (Jerzy Butryn) in Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne 2023

    Rebel, rapist, libertine or libertarian?
    Staging Mozart’s Don Giovanni

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

Guides

  • 1216 Portrait of Ethel Smyth<br>PBBHMT 1216 Portrait of Ethel Smyth

    Know the score
    Without Ethel Smyth and classical music's forgotten women, we only tell half the story

    Leah Broad
  • From left: The Tempest, The Minotaur, L’amour de loin, Hamlet

    The?best classical music works of the 21st century

  • A?guide to contemporary classical music

  • Fireworks light the sky above the Brandenburg Gate shortly after midnight in Berlin, Friday, Jan. 1, 2016. Hundred of thousands of people gathered for the New Year celebrations, welcoming the new year 2016 at the area around the Brandenburg Gate in the capital of Germany. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

    A musical tour of Europe
    Stephen Moss's guide to the music of Europe's great cities: Berlin

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

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