As always, great concerts have outnumbered great opera productions over a year, and all of our national orchestras can be proud of their record. I’ve sometimes started by celebrating youth, and it’s ...

In an ideal world an end-of-year roundup would applaud only new ventures – fresh productions that you may curse for having ...

Young eldritch junkie Nick Cave would have struggled to predict his maturity as a font of wry and sacred wisdom, or the fathomless loss he reckoned with en route.

O stay and hear,” sings Twelfth Night’s jester Feste in his song “O mistress mine”, “your true love’s coming,/ That can sing ...

Looking back over the past 12 months, it struck me how it has been the shows fashioned from personal stories that have stayed ...

Maybe it was the timing, even though most of the action takes place in bright sunlight, that made The Split’s two-parter ...

A reissue can be an aide-mémoire, a reminder that a record which has been off the radar for a while needs revisiting, that it deserves fresh attention.

Another “complete piano works” and anniversary crossover was Lucas Debargue’s 4 CD set of Fauré (Sony) marking the centenary of his death. It charts the composer’s progression from mid-19th century ...

Beth Gibbons’s latest album touched me more deeply than most of what I heard in 2024. She’s true to herself and honest in a way that’s extraordinarily disarming. Her vulnerability matches, in a ...

The most hyped special of the season came to a cosy comedy ending with pairings accomplished, evil witch Sonia and her coven dispatched and the usual everyday chaos reinstated. Tidy.Except that I ...

Katherine Priddy released a winter single with the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, “Close Season”, wrapping the spirit of winter and snowfall into the uncertainty and possession of attraction, ...