BBC Music Magazine

‘When we spoke, Andrew Lloyd Webber had spent weeks battling to get his latest production, Cinderella , up and running. Talking about his symphonic suites was a relief, and he was revealing about his epic career.’ ‘“Children develop more in the firs

Two years ago – though it seems a world away now – I had the pleasure of joining wine writer Oz Clarke and members of the Armonico Consort for a beer in a Gloucestershire pub. They were on a sponsored cycle ride from the Midlands to Dorset, stopping

Plus the instrument we wished we’d learnt at school (see p48) Acting editor Jeremy Pound Trombone: preferable to scraping away at the back of the second violins in the orchestra Reviews editor Michael Beek Oboe: I regret passing up the opportun

The deluge of puns and Gilbertian references in Tom Service’s eloquent article (September) testifies to the impact this incomparable librettist has had on the English language. The brassy splendour and haunting drone accompaniment that bring down the

Every month we will award the best letter with a year’s Platinum subscription to classical music streaming site Primephonic, giving you lossless 24-bit FLAC access to hundreds of thousands of recordings – worth £149. The editor reserves the right to

Write to: The editor, BBC Music Magazine, Eagle House, Bristol, BS1 4ST Email: music@classical-music.com Social media: contact us on Facebook and Twitter Thank you for the cover CD of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 on your September issue. It is revolution

30,000 … visitors to this year’s Verbier Festival in Switzerland, despite the difficulties caused by Covid-19. 20 …years of successful business, being celebrated by online classical music retailer Presto Music this autumn. 12 …years left before musi

You can’t beat a nice floaty melody, they say, and London now boasts its first ever waterborne concert hall, with the launch of The Piano Boat this summer. Pootling gently up and down canals in the Colne Valley Regional Park just west of the capital,

Born: Hempstead, NY Career highlight: Taking part in the Soundtrack of America concert series at the Shed in New York City, under the direction of Steve McQueen and Quincy Jones. It celebrated the impact of African-American music on today’s culture,

5th: Featuring such songs as ‘Candle in the Wind’ and ‘Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)’, Elton John’s seventh studio album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, is released. In just a week, the album reaches gold status as sales pass 500,000, and will

Composer Orlando Gough and librettist Stephen Plaice have written a ‘people’s opera, a post-Brexit satire on the Great British seaside sung by the people who live there’. Called Bloom Britannia , its first production will be staged from 22-24 October

Pianist Sarah Cahill has recorded a three-volume set called The Future is Female. The project sees her perform works by 70 women from around the world and from the 18th century to the present. Sessions took place at St Stephen’s Church in Belvedere,

Jean Cras was a musician and a marine – I think maybe he was more famous for his military career. I was quite young when I discovered this piece and I immediately liked the spirit of it – happy, generous, loving and tender. There are also many charac

This year’s Britt Festival in Jacksonville, Oregon included the world premiere of Brush: Music in the Woodlands by US composer Caroline Shaw. The audience walked along trails in the woodlands where they encountered groups of musicians who played snip

With the easing of Covid-19 restrictions, we made our first visit to Tanglewood. It was wonderful to see attendees spilling over onto the lawn outside the ‘Shed’. Adam Hickox (pictured above) started with Beethoven Leonore Overture No. 2 – appropriat

Autumn seems not to have had the decency to wait patiently for its turn this year, pushing its way rudely into line somewhere in the middle of August. Bowing to the inevitable, then, I’ve turned to Respighi’s gorgeous Poema autunnale for violin and o

Covid has been a spur to ingenuity in the music world, as well as the cause of much despair and hardship. For one column, then, I want to celebrate our pandemic heroes: those who, despite everything, kept the show running in some form or other throug

The Lloyd Webber household in the late 1960s was rarely a quiet one. Living under the same roof at that time were, among others, the established composer William Lloyd Webber, his older son Andrew, already following in his father’s footsteps, and his

Aside from the quirky combination of instruments, perhaps the next thing that grabs the attention is the name. Why The Hermes Experiment? ‘Hermes was the name of our webmail server at university, so was something we all had in common!’ says Héloïse W

Shankar’s musical drama, expressed through mime and dance as well as singing, explores through its eponymous dancer the issue of drug abuse in the Indian community. This production opened the newly restored Opera House and starred Bryn Terfel as the

While there is plenty of music for piano four hands, the choice for those who wish to sit together on an organ stool is much more limited – a handful of works by the likes of Berwald, Wesley and Albrechtsberger aside, original pieces for organ four h

Less than decade after the Dresden Staatskappelle’s performances at the Queen’s Hall in November 1936, both the London venue and the orchestra’s own home lay in ruins, as German and English bombers took their toll. On 10 May 1941, the Queen’s Hall, t

Kodály: Children build enthusiasm and confidence as they learn to listen and sing in tune through singing songs and playing simple musical games, while also acquiring skills in tempo, rhythm, pitch and dynamics. British Kodály Academy: kodaly.org.uk

When the Hungarian conductor Georg Solti became music director of the Chicago Symphony in 1969, the orchestra was $5m in debt and in a rut artistically. Just four years later, Time magazine splashed Solti on its cover – ‘the fastest baton in the West

Orchestration Though at times dense, and rarely experimental or radical, his scoring has individuality in the woodwind writing (e.g. the opening of Symphony No. 4) and the darker instrumental colours used in chamber music-like passages. Lower instrum

LIFE: He enters the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he studies composition with Lyadov and orchestration with Rimsky-Korsakov, and befriends the young Prokofiev. TIMES: Finland, an autonomous principality of the Russian Empire, is the world’s secon

Reaching his fiftieth birthday in 1963, Britten already appeared something of a ‘grand old man’ of British music with his operas Peter Grimes and Turn of the Screw being performed to great acclaim around the world, while his War Requiem, premiered th

Rostropovich’s first recording, a live performance in Russia, is generally quicker and less comfortable than his second version which, recorded by Decca at Snape Maltings in 1968, offers the stamp of the composer. Here you sense history in the making

Variety is the spice of life, and I like to think we offer something for all tastes. So if you’re feeling adventurous, you might like to take in modern cello concertos by Sebastian Fagerlund or orchestral works by Max Richter. If you want to stick to

Sean Shibe (guitar) Pentatone PTC 5186 870 56:20 mins Whether Sean Shibe would have made this album or its kind without going through what he describes as ‘a difficult and traumatic’ pandemic lockdown is, of course ,impossible to know. What is cert

Pandemic isolation has inspired a lot of albums of late, but this feels different, more hopeful… I think that’s what I wanted it to be. When I was writing the notes and examining how I feel about it, there was a realisation that it’s definitely a sor

Ballet Royal de la Naissance de Vénus; plus extracts from ballets LWV 21, 43, 45 & 52 Deborah Cachet, Bénédicte Tauran, Ambroisine Bré; Chœur de Chambre de Namur; Les Talens Lyriques/ Christoph Rousset Aparté AP255 71:43 mins Before Lully invente

In many respects Simon Boccanegra is your typical Verdi opera, with a plotline that interweaves political tension and family drama. Its roots are in an 1843 play of the same name by the Spanish dramatist Antonio García Gutiérrez. Verdi had already st

This set of seven short traditional Spanish songs was arranged by Falla in 1914. The advent of the First World War forced him to return to Madrid from Paris, where had been living for a few years. He dedicated it to Madame Ida Godebska, a popular sal

Of all the Italian composer’s chamber works, the Nonetto is perhaps the most fulfilling. It is certainly the most representative of his skill in the medium – indeed it’s something of a ‘summing up’ of just about everything he’d brought to bear in his

Harpsichord Sonatas Mitzi Meyerson (harpsichord) Glossa GCD921810 78:49 mins A contemporary of Haydn, the Bohemian composer Joseph Anton Steffan (1726-97) fled his war-torn country to settle in Vienna in 1741 where he became the teacher of the futu

Unlike his monumental First Sonata, aka the Concord Sonata , the American composer’s Third Piano Sonata is a stitch in time at under ten minutes in length. It was perhaps never really meant to see the light of day, given it was begun in the early 190

RVW from America revives some forgotten recordings of the early 1950s, with mixed sonic results. The Concerto for Two Pianos benefits from an expert performance by Whittemore and Lowe – one of the top duos at the time – placed rather too prominently

There’s no questioning the suitability of the two-manual accordion in taking on the Goldbergs, given the work’s two-manual harpsichord origins, and Telari sticks closely to Bach’s musical expression. It’s quite a feast of solo accordion, however, whi

John McLaughlin (guitar, guitar synth, piano), Julian Siegel (tenor sax), Étienne M’bappé (bass), Gary Husband (drums, piano), Ranjit Barot (drums, konokol), Vinnie Colaiuta, Nicolas Viccaro (drums) et al Abstract Logix Records ABLX065 British guita

American guitarist Julian Lage was a child prodigy who started playing at five, had a documentary film made about his life at eight and performed at a Grammy awards ceremony when he was 13. But his folksy, genre-crossing repertoire means he’s kept a

Growing up in the Israeli resort of Netanya in the 1980s, on a diet of pop radio and improvising in his bedroom on an electronic keyboard, Omer Klein started early priming himself for a life in jazz. Today, with three albums in the bag for Warner Mus

The Q Active 200’s control hub (Wi-Fi and Ethernet) takes audio from a plethora of digital, analogue and streaming inputs and sends it wirelessly to each speaker in 24-bit/96kHz hi-res. But what’s brilliant about the 100W (280W peak) speakers is the

What are active speakers? Essentially, they are speakers you may stream music directly to, thanks to their built-in powered amplifiers and wireless capabilities. In short, they offer high-resolution streaming and audiophile sound quality in a space-s

Orcadian composer Erland Cooper and violinist Daniel Pioro pay tribute to Stromness poet George Mackay Brown, who would have turned 100 this year. Their lyrical portrait will be paired with archive interviews and field recordings. Between the Ears:

Born and brought up in London, Steve Rosenberg moved to Moscow in 1991 to teach English. He then entered journalism and held several posts in the Russian capital before being appointed the BBC Moscow correspondent in 2003 – a position he later return

Dvorák Slavonic Dances, Op. 46 Aloys and Alfons Kontarsky (piano) Deutsche Grammophon 449 5502 Victor Borge A Mozart Opera by Borge Sony G010001222314F Charpentier Te Deum – Prélude Orchestre de Chambre des Concerts Pasdeloup/Louis Martini Warner