Classical Music
Empty Seats At The Met
Peter Gelb cannot fill New York’s opera house. Can it be saved from terminal decline?
London’s Music Has Gone Flat
The life force has vanished from the capital’s classical music scene in recent years. Who is to blame?
Keep Calm And Carry On Playing
A performance of a modern Israeli classic in a run-down German city put the world’s woes in perspective
Thanks, Ma
The great cellist Yo-Yo Ma at 60 is still phenomenal
The Symphony: A Moral Vision Revealed In Music
Beethoven set the bar impossibly high but composers like myself still regard it as the ultimate challenge
Glorious Summer
When it comes to summer festival opera, Britain tends to get it right
The Last Of The BBC Proms
This summer’s dumbing down is just the prelude to ditching everything this great festival stands for
Cleveland’s Pride Makes Perfect
The rustbelt city’s orchestra is reinventing its networking role. No wonder Chicago is jealous
Music Of The Future Cannot Ignore The Past
Composers who try to create culture in a vacuum will struggle to be heard by a hostile public
The Light And The Dark
Sir Malcolm Arnold’s oeuvre, too often dismissed as “light” music, deserves rehabilitation
Tolerating the intolerant
“For those who thought that a global pandemic would sound the death knell for identity politics, think again”
How to prevent the next pandemic
‘I have been reporting as a science journalist for years that the world is at increasing risk of pandemics like this; that this was predicted; that we know what we need to do to prepare and we simply haven’t done it; and that more and worse pandemics are coming so we need to do that, now’
D’où parles-tu? The post-truth world
Power, illusion and the open society: how postmodernism undermines our foundational concepts