On 17 July 1986, Nathan Milstein played his last public recital in the Berwaldhallen in Stockholm. The recital included the Bach Chaconne, one of the towering masterpieces of Western music and one of the most difficult to do justice to. Milstein was…

A film about Georges Bizet and his ill-starred masterpiece. This film has two themes: first the substance and narrative of Bizet's perennially popular opera and second the story of its disastrous première, which had such a dramatic effect on Bizet…

In Spring 2019, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, led by John Eliot Gardiner, presented a critically-acclaimed European tour of Handel’s opera Semele, including Alexandra Palace Theatre in London, where this live recording took place…

João Gilberto is winner of two Grammy awards and nominee for six, he is one of the most important figures in Brazilian music and the grandmaster of bossa nova. His first and only approved live video was taped in November 2006 at the age of 75 in…

German composer Richard Wagner was notoriously anti-Semitic, and his writings on Jews were later embraced by Hitler and the Nazis. But there is another, lesser-known side to this story. For years, many of Wagner‘s closest associates were Jews - young…

Sergei Rachmaninoff's The Miserly Knight & Aleko from the Dmitri Hvorostovsky Festival 2019

Sir John Falstaff is an anarchist who obeys only the reign of his own enjoyment, an egoist who feeds only his power-hunger and his own flesh, and who would prefer to raze the small-minded morals of his contemporaries like the walls of a fortress – by…

The late French composer Pierre Henry was among the pivotal forces behind the development of musique concrète, becoming the first formally educated musician to devote his energies to the electronic medium. His final work Dracula was originally…

Monteverdi’s iconic opera articulates Orpheus’ attempts to soothe the keepers of Hades with his voice and his lyre. He is allowed to release his beloved Eurydice from the realm of the dead, on the one condition that he does not turn around to look at…

Copernicus, the man behind the title of the opera, brought the revolution that radically changed man’s way of seeing things, shifting from the earth to the sun and its sacred flames. Barely a few stories – for there is no dramatic conflict here, no…