Verdi

Cristina, Regina di Svezia Wexford Festival Opera****The third of this year’s Wexford Festival operas, Foroni’s Cristina, Regina di Svezia (1849), was(...)

It can be fascinating to trace the changing reputations of composers and their music. Take the case of Louis Spohr. Sixteen years before his death in (...)

‘It appealed to something vaguely perverse in me, the idea of the living doll, like Olympia in Les Contes d’Hoffmann.” Composer Raymond Deane is expla(...)

The old saw has it that performances on period instruments are like cleaning the varnish off the work of an old master and showing the true colours fo(...)

‘What isn’t music?”A composer put this twist on the classic question – what is music? – at a public interview during the Kilkenny Arts Festival. It wa(...)

Most music lovers in Ireland take it for granted, as if it’s the natural order of things. RTÉ is the dominant force in the country’s orchestral life, (...)

Can you name a composer who described his own music as “horrid”? We live in a world where classical music is often portrayed as relaxing, and in a cou(...)

Jim Golden, who has died after a short illness aged 77, was a former chairman of Wexford Festival Opera, and vice-principal of St Peter’s College, Wex(...)

The organ series at St Michael’s Church in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin started its 40th series on Sunday, and Gerard Gillen, the man who began it all, wa(...)

Oskar von Riesemann published his biography of Rachmaninov based on interviews with the composer in 1934. The composer’s favourite was the cantata The(...)