The Guardian

Cecilia Bartoli sings Bellini’s Norma: exclusive album stream

Listen exclusively to a new period-instrument recording of Bellini’s tragic opera that, with Cecilia Bartoli as the priestess, reveals the heroine as a woman of flesh and blood.

The scratch orchestra of Kinshasa

The members of the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste – the world’s only all-black orchestra – are self-taught and started out playing homemade instruments. Now the band’s founder is to be given a major international accolade.

The Telegraph

Proms booking ‘fiasco’ as BBC announces record-breaking sales

The booking system for this year’s BBC Proms has been condemned as a “fiasco” as customers waited more than four hours for tickets inly to find out touts selling them for £1,250 elsewhere.

The Times

Vladimir Jurowski, the Zen maestro of opera

Emma Pomfret meets Vladimir Jurowski, Glynedebourne’s spellbinding Russian conductor. Just don’t call him a ‘prodigy’.

Gramophone

Operatic stars join forces to record songs of John Denver

Album features such names as Plácido Domingo, Danielle de Niese, René Pape and Thomas Hampson.

The Washington Post (via Arts Journal)

Ballets Russes drove audiences away from modern music? Just the opposite.

The premiere of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” in 1913 is often cited as a flash point in the divide between new music and its audience. From this point on — so the claim goes — the chasm widened between composers pursuing their own agendas and audiences wishing they could just be left alone to hear Mozart.

The Telegraph