A Conversation With JAN VOGLER: Dresden Music Festival 2016
TIME is the overriding motto for the 2016 DRESDEN FESTIVAL. Music can play with time in so many interesting ways, music can even suspend time creating frozen moments, moments of stasis where time ceases to exist –…
A Conversation With SIR PAUL McCARTNEY: BBC Radio 4 Kaleidoscope
Proud of this one from 1997. I remember the day well: me, McCartney and his press agent congregating in the Broadcasting House lobby, heads turning. Then a swift elevator to the fifth floor studio sharing with a…
A Conversation With SIMON SLATER: ‘Carmen Disruption’ at the Almeida
Simon Stephens’ Carmen Disruption upends the expectations of anyone entering the Almeida Theatre. It’s a kind of living poetry, taking its cue from Bizet’s ever-popular opera but taking it into ever darker territory. When does an artist’s…
A Conversation With LIISA RANDALU: Schumann Quartet release 2nd CD
The brothers Erik, Ken, and Mark Schumann founded the SCHUMANN QUARTET in 2007 and it might well have been an all-family affair had the cellist’s twin sister chosen to switch from violin to viola and join them.…
A Conversation With DAME JANET BAKER
Every now and again – but only very rarely – a professional engagement comes along that is so personal, so loaded with treasured associations, that it transcends all normal parameters and takes on a significance all of…
A Conversation With LINUS ROTH: Crusading for Weinberg
The Polish composer Miecyzlaw Weinberg – his Holocaust opera The Passenger caused quite a stir in David Pountney’s premiere staging – has a new champion. The talented young German violinist Linus Roth has taken his music and…
A Conversation With VASILY PETRENKO: Shostakovich Symphony No.13 “Babi Yar”
With the final release in Vasily Petrenko’s much-lauded Shostakovich cycle on Naxos the young maestro talks to Edward Seckerson about a masterpiece the Soviet authorities tried but failed to sabotage at its first performances. YevgenyYevtushenko’s poem “Babi…
A Conversation With CORINNE WINTERS: Life before and after the London ‘Traviata’
In February 2013 Corinne Winters created an absolute sensation in her operatic European debut when Peter Konwitschny’s starkly intense staging of Verdi’s La Traviata arrived at English National Opera. Vocally, physically, dramatically her Violetta (“the whore who…
A Conversation With VASILY PETRENKO: Shostakovich’s Symphony No 14
At its première in June 1969 Shostakovich described his Symphony No. 14, in effect a symphonic song cycle, as ‘a fight for the liberation of humanity… a great protest against death, a reminder to live one’s life…
A Conversation With REINHARD GOEBEL & MIRIJAM CONTZEN: New Mozart Violin Concertos recording
In Leopold Mozart’s old house (now a museum) in the Bavarian city of Augsburg a piano tuner is hard at work tuning one of the working exhibits – a venerable clavichord. Enter Reinhard Goebel and Mirijam Contzen…
