"I wish I could say everything there is to say in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end" said Leonard Cohen, seen above on the terrace of his house on the Greek island of Hydra.Leonard Cohen is a sublime poet and songwriter. But unfortunate t...

Let's daydream for a moment. What do we really need to do to reach young audiences and revitalise classical music? In an ideal world we would have the facilities and support of one of the world's top concert halls for a week. Over six evenings we would want around 1500 school-aged youngsters from 50...

The General - Melodrama: I was one human being [Egmont: No. 8 Melodrama] By permission Sony BMG A persuasive combination of Beethoven's music and a contemporary text inspired by the 1994 Rwandan genocide looks like being this year's best kept music secret. Last autumn I added a comment to my post Al...

Iterations are the way forward for classical music. In the continuing quest for new audiences the iterative process currently involves new music, new composers, new media, new recorded music distribution models, new performance venues and new pricing structures. Over the weekend Aldeburgh Music cont...

Avant-garde composer Edgar Varèse and Georges Simenon, creator of Inspector Maigret, would seem to have little in common. But, during Simenon's five year post-war exile in America, Varèse was one of the few close friends he had in New York, and the two spent hours walking through Greenwich Village...

The colourful ghosts are coming to Snape this weekend. And no, it is not The Turn of the Screw . A new opera commissioned by Aldeburgh Music tells of magic and mayhem on city streets. The composer is a woman, the director is English-Iranian, the score mixes acoustic and amplified electronic sounds, ...

Jocelyn Pook’s Oppenheimer mixes Robert Oppenheimer invoking the Bhagavad Gita with a recording of the liturgy of the Yemenite Jews and the text of the Catholic requiem mass, all underpinned with violin, viola and and keyboards. The seven minute long Oppenheimer is one of the sections in Flood; th...

Gertrud Kolmar was one of the estimated 1.1 million Jews who died in Auschwitz. Born Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner in Berlin in 1894, she is regarded as one of the finest poets in the German language. One of her best known poems is Aus Dem Dunkel - Out of the Darkness. In July 1941 Gertrud Kolmar was i...

Harrison Birtwistle dominates the 2009 Aldeburgh Festival. The two week festival in June includes no less than four performances of a double bill of newly commissioned music theatre pieces from Birtwistle. These fully-staged world premieres will be the first festival performances in the new 340 seat...

The poor light and rose-coloured spots do not help. But my camera does not lie. That is a full-strength orchestra packed into a circus ring in front of a capacity audience. The band is the Russian State Philharmonic Orchestra, and I took the photo last night in one of oldest surviving working circus...