On Saturday, Oliver Mears, the director of opera at London’s Royal Ballet and Opera, walked on stage at the curtain call of “Il Trovatore” to try to take down a Palestine flag that was unveiled by a dancer. Mears began to aggressively rip the flag from the performer’s hands, then stormed off the stage when […]
Author Archives: Hugh Morris
Hugh Morris is a freelance writer and editor based in London.
Posted inReport
“A Call To Action, Disguised As A Symphony”
At the Barbican Centre in early May, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO), the City of London Choir and London Voices premiered a 49-minute piece titled “Lim Cosmic Rhapsody.” Their recording of the piece, which featured pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, had just been released on Decca Classics, and the performance marked the first outing for score, published […]
Posted inBarTálk
The Clear White Light
In a staging of John Tavener’s “The Protecting Veil” at Clapton’s Round Chapel at Spitalfields Music Festival on Sunday, director Anna Morrissey led musicians and dancers from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in an expressive set of stage pictures, loosely following the scheme of Tavener’s work. “The Protecting Veil” collects a set of […]
Posted inBreaking
Gagged!
Contracts seen by VAN show that the management of Northern Ballet has inserted a confidentiality clause into the agreements for its freelance musicians. In this agreement, which VAN understands has been in place since the start of the year, the artist “shall make no adverse or derogatory comment or announcement to the public press, social […]
Posted inBreaking
A Question of Endorsement
On May 26, Art Not Arms posted an open letter to Kings Place, the London classical music venue and conference center, that called for the cancellation of the upcoming Defence in Space Conference in October. This conference is sponsored by arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin. The open letter noted that Lockheed Martin is involved in the […]
Posted inInterview
Specialities
Phoning in from Frankfurt—he’s there getting a visa ahead of his conducting debut at La Scala—Kazuki Yamada radiates positivity down the Zoom call. An extremely popular conductor in Birmingham, where he is currently City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s music director and artistic advisor, it was recently announced that Yamada would succeed Robin Ticciati as the […]
Posted inInterview
Dialogues
Both Catherine Lamb and I arrive for our interview in a west Berlin park slightly distracted, and the universe works to make us more so. First, a bird in a bush behind our bench insists on everyone hearing its loud, virtuosic song; we swiftly relocate to the grass in the middle of the square. Then, […]
Posted inBarTálk
A Proper Continuum
On Sunday, a new “Don Giovanni,” the final staging of Kirill Serebrennikov’s Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, premiered at the Komische Oper in Berlin. It imagined the title character as being taken through the bardo throughout the opera, following the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and substituted movements from Mozart’s Requiem for the work’s usual finale. After […]
Posted inBarTálk
Sweating, But Functionally
Last night, the Southbank Centre launched its new classical music festival: Multitudes, a space designed to bring different artforms closer together. Over the next few weeks, new video works by William Kentridge and Kirill Sebrennikov accompany Shostakovich symphonies, Igor Levit and Marina Abramović perform Satie’s “Vexations,” and Tom Morris directs a semi-staged performance of Mahler’s […]
Posted inReport
These Are The Top Republican Donors Also Donating To Classical Music
In May 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, many American classical music institutions joined what appeared to be a society-wide reckoning on racism. The Minnesota Orchestra commissioned a work in Floyd’s memory, by composer Carlos Simon and librettist Marc Bamuthi, called “brea(d)th.” The Chicago Symphony Orchestra shared sobering […]