The Guardian

Royal Opera music director rails at young opera stars’ ‘weakness’

Antonio Pappano claims that ‘they are weaker in their bodies or don’t care’ and are too ready to pull out of productions

The Independent

Justin Bieber song ‘Beauty And A Beat’ gets classical revamp on Radio 3 for Comic Relief

Teen pop idol Justin Bieber is unlikely to be heard on highbrow Radio 3, but he will be this week when one of his hits gets a classical makeover.

Gramophone

Royal Opera to stage Verdi’s Les Vepres siciliennes with the ballet intact

Covent Garden premiere is the highlight of a busy 2013-14 season including seven new productions

Classic FM

Pope Francis loves opera

Never mind pop music, we’re talking Pope music – and it seems the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergolio is a particular fan of opera.

BBC Music Magazine

Winners of South Bank Sky Arts Awards announced

Scottish Opera and London Philharmonic Orchestra take home prizes

Music Week

Twitter Music app to launch within weeks – report

Social media platform Twitter is to launch its own standalone app after acquiring music discovery platform We Are Hunted.

Classic FM

(Written on March 14, 2013 )

Every day the WildKat team scan the newspapers and blogs online to bring you a digested list of the day’s classical music.

Gramophone

BBC 4 explores the symphony

Four documentaries to be broadcast throughout November

The Times (£)

Joan of Arc at the Stake, at the Barbican, EC2

The conductor Marin Alsop has been unafraid to answer the obvious question about her weekend with the London Symphony Orchestra devoted to Joan of Arc. “Being a woman in a field typically without a lot of women I feel a connection,” she told The Times, a reminder that while Alsop has blazed a trail for woman conductors, a new generation has hardly rushed to follow.

The Telegraph

Kate Middleton and Prince Charles pay visits to the opera together

The Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, has been making series of visits to the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden to watch ballet and opera productions with her father-in-law Prince Charles.

The Financial Times

Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall, London

Infernal Dance”, the year-long survey of Bartók from Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra, left the best to last….

Classical Music Online

Dudamel and Bolivar Orchestra coming to Raploch for London 2012

Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Orchestra will take up a four-day residency at Sistema Scotland in Raploch, Stirling in June next year. The residency will culminate in an outdoor concert on 21 June, one of the opening events in the UK-wide London 2012 Festival for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games.

(Written on November 7, 2011 )

Every day the WildKat team scan the newspapers and blogs online to bring you a digested list of the day’s classical music.

The Guardian

The five symphonies that changed music.

Ahead of a new four-part series exploring how the symphony has shaped our history and identity, Mark Elder chooses the form’s five key works.

New York Times

Philharmonic and Glass Meet for Movie Night

However much credit Alan Gilbert may deserve for beginning to update the New York Philharmonic repertory, the slowness with which it has come to the music Philip Glass says a lot about its distance from today’s repertory.

The Times (£)

La Sonnambula at Covent Garden

Funny thing, sleepwalking — especially in Bellini’s opera. You can sleepwalk each night without nearest and dearest ever knowing. Out for the count, you still talk and sing. Even a freezing alpine snowdrift, touched with bare feet, won’t break the spell. Marvelous. Ridiculous. That’s opera.

The Financial Times

La Sonnambula , Royal Opera House, London

It is interesting to speculate what kind of opera Bellini might have written if he had been alive today. Surely he would not have tried anything as simple as La sonnambula? This modest tale of a girl who goes sleepwalking before her wedding and almost loses her loved one belongs in an altogether more innocent age.

(Written on November 4, 2011 )

Every day the WildKat team scan the newspapers and blogs online to bring you a digested list of the day’s classical music news.

The Telegraph

A new 9/11 anniversary oratorio: and against the odds, it works

Not in Our Time is a terrific piece whose textual content may cause choirs and audiences to think: is this for us? Emphatically it is. And now it ought to come to London, thinks Michael White.

The Guardian

Let the classical music stream forth – online

Surely it’s time opera houses and concert halls threw open their gilded doors and made classical music available to the world? So asks Tom Service.

Slipped Disc

Where are the Big Beast violinists?

Norman Lebrecht asks why it is that no violinist today enjoys genuine world fame.

The Times

David Pountney and the Holocaust opera

The Welsh National Opera has veered between mediocrity and magnificence. David Pountney will steady the ship, says Richard Morrison.

The great Covent Garden costume sale

It’s impossible not to come away star-struck, says Emma Pomfret.

(Written on September 15, 2011 )