Opinion
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Should we care if Chopin was gay?
Debating the sexuality of musical icons offers a fuller and more tolerant understanding of our formative cultural influences,
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‘Women didn’t compose back then’ – or did they?
Pianist and musicologist Samantha Ege urges music lovers to explore the wealth of repertoire by Black women composers as she launches...
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Thinking big
Little girls don’t play big Beethoven… or do they? Jessica Duchen examines established thinking on gendered repertoire
I’m flying.
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Will the piano industry survive the pandemic?
Some of Europe’s oldest companies are piano manufacturers. Steinway, Bechstein, Blüthner and Bösendorfer were all established around the mid-19th century.
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Tuning in to audiences at Piano Cleveland
How can classical music engage new audiences and keep them coming back? Piano Cleveland president Yaron Kohlberg considers some solutions
In 2015,
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Getting political: opera as activism
Composer and Labour party member Keith Burstein’s latest opera The Prometheus Revolution explores a country in meltdown as the forces of war and greed...
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Ticket prices don’t foster elitism. Atmosphere does.
It pains me to bring up the ‘E’ word, when so much perceived ‘elitism’ is generated purely by clumsy discussion of it.
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Opera’s worst-kept secret?
Twenty women have now accused Plácido Domingo of sexual harassment. Josephine Miles reflects on the opera world’s reaction,
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Plácido Domingo accused of sexual harassment
Plácido Domingo has been accused of sexually harassing a number of women over the course of three decades.
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Are we entering a new age of musical nationalism?
My invitation to the premiere of György Kurtág’s first opera Fin de partie must have got lost in the post but the Hungarian Prime...
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In the long term, evolution will serve stifled talent better than revolution will
A one-sex shortlist of candidates in any field is enough to prompt a groan – or something altogether angrier. What greeted the social media...
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We shouldn’t be too surprised that folk are fighting in our concert halls
1600 Swedes settled down for an evening of ferocious, unbridled passions at Malmö Live Concert Hall on 11 October. And that is what they...
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Lists of the ‘most powerful’ are the last things culture and the fight against prejudice need
Woman’s Hour’s list of the most powerful women in music was designed to provoke conversation, though not the one that actually resulted.
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Academics who dismiss musical literacy have confused recreation with study
A year after Charlotte C Gill questioned the pedagogical significance of western musical notation in the Guardian, the debate has flared again.
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Whatever happened to classical music as the product of artistic and intellectual endeavour?
Like me, you may have wondered where in the world the laboratory actually lies. You know the one I’m talking about – the underground...
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2018: a good year to consign the label ‘maestro’ to history?
With the Metropolitan Opera’s sacking of James Levine came the surest sign yet that sexual and mental abuse exists at the highest levels of...
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Spoiler alert: social media is cleansing live performance of any sense of surprise
I remember sitting in the London Coliseum one wet Friday night back in 2009, waiting for the curtain to rise on Rupert Goold’s production...
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Wellbeing is as important in the office as on the stage
It is good to read that the ABO’s Healthy Orchestra Charter extends to management as well as musicians, but it was not always thus.
Could equality be the key to enlivening our ossified programming?
There I was, leafing through the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra’s season brochure, aghast at all the wondrous oddities contained therein: a season-long theme of refreshing...
The slow marginalisation of music education will be a disaster for the diversity politicians demand
We learned some weeks ago that a state school in Yorkshire is to start charging students for the privilege of taking a GCSE in...
