Skip to main contentSkip to navigation
Print subscriptions
Sign in
Search jobs
Search
The Guardian - Back to homeThe Guardian

Classical music & opera

  • ‘He’s still a boy!’ … Lim at the Van Cliburn piano competition.

    Prom 2024
    Is this 20-year-old the greatest pianist of our times? Yunchan Lim, the Korean about to electrify the Proms

  • A packed Royal Albert Hall applaud Yuja Wang, Klaus Mäkelä and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at 2023’s Proms festival.

    Proms 2024
    ‘We’re in for a treat’: five Proms performers pick their highlights of the season

    From operatic to the orgiastic, and fanfares to the ‘fantastique’, leading musicians tell us which concert they’ll be sure not to miss of the eight-week festival which opens this weekend.
  • Elim Chan, press photo

    Interview
    Proms conductor Elim Chan: ‘Being who you are is powerful. Not all orchestras can take it’

    Her conducting is so ravishing that it was claimed one audience member climaxed. Now the Hong Kong-born pioneer is set to give the Proms a spectacular start

Live reviews

  • Richard Burkhard in Il Segreto di Susanna.

    Il Segreto di Susanna/Pagliacci review – a double whammy of sexual jealousy

  • Sian Edwards conducts Birmingham Contemporary Music Group playing Sonata For Broken Fingers.

    Sonata for Broken Fingers review – chamber opera of Stalin’s terror fails to grip

  • Stephanie Lamprea and the Hebrides Ensemble perform Pierrot Lunaire.

    Hebrides Ensemble/Lamprea review – Schoenberg’s Pierrot is pushed to extremes

  • L to R Hilary Summers as Disinganno, Hilary Cronin as Piacere and Anna Dennis as Bellezza . Il Trionfo e del disinganno at Buxton International Festival, July 2024

    Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno review – imaginative staging transforms Handel’s oratorio

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

Album reviews

  • ‘The cacophony of existential questions’ … Beyza Yazgan.

    Beyza Yazgan: Human Cocoon review – from Middle Eastern classical to American minimalism

  • Multitalented … Eighth Blackbird.

    Lang: Composition as Explanation album review – Gertrude Stein set to music

  • Immaculate playing … Dover Quartet.

    Beethoven: Complete String Quartets album review – up there with the best

  • Better resolution Yannick Nézet-Séguin Press publicity portrait Credit: George Etheredge

    Brahms: The Symphonies album review – less is more for Nézet-Séguin and the COE

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

People

  • Jakub Jozef Orlinski at Warner Music Uk, South Kensington, London, for Q&A New Review, 26/06/2024. Sophia Evans for The Observer

    Q&A
    Countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński: ‘Breakdancing feeds into my performances – music dictates the way you move on stage’

  • Roger Wright, CEO of Britten Pears Arts

    ‘I’ve always been a glass half full person’
    Aldeburgh festival’s outgoing CEO Roger Wright

  • Jerrold Northrop Moore began his Elgar researches as a student by interviewing people who had known the composer.

    Obituary
    Jerrold Northrop Moore

  • Actor and writer Paterson Joseph

    ‘I was told I was stupid’
    Peep Show’s Paterson Joseph on his debut novel – and writing three operas

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

You may have missed

  • Backstage during dress rehearsals

    The Guardian picture essay
    Love, laughs and lavish designs: The Merry Widow at Glyndebourne

  • ‘Our first time’ … Gemma New will conduct the world premiere of City of Floating Sounds.

    In the key of 5G
    The ‘dimensionalist’ who wrote a symphony for 1,000 phones

  • Beatrice Harrison, cellist, with microphone

    The spy, the songbird and the sham that wasn’t
    How I restored broadcasting history

  • Tradition … the band of the Durham Miners Association.

    I’ve got the Hovis ad in one ear and the Battle of Orgreave in the other
    My obsession with brass bands

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

Guides

  • 1216 Portrait of Ethel Smyth<br>PBBHMT 1216 Portrait of Ethel Smyth

    Know the score
    Without Ethel Smyth and classical music's forgotten women, we only tell half the story

    Leah Broad
  • From left: The Tempest, The Minotaur, L’amour de loin, Hamlet

    The best classical music works of the 21st century

  • A guide to contemporary classical music

  • Fireworks light the sky above the Brandenburg Gate shortly after midnight in Berlin, Friday, Jan. 1, 2016. Hundred of thousands of people gathered for the New Year celebrations, welcoming the new year 2016 at the area around the Brandenburg Gate in the capital of Germany. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

    A musical tour of Europe
    Stephen Moss's guide to the music of Europe's great cities: Berlin

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

Most viewed