BBC Music Magazine

5 min read

When Handel died at his London home in 1759, the whole nation mourned. Three thousand people turned out for his full state funeral and to see him buried in Westminster Abbey. Unlike JS Bach, Handel’s music remained in circulation, a staple of coronat

Who Do You Think You Are?

1 min read

Born in Halle, then in Brandenburg-Prussia but now in Germany, in 1685, George Frideric Handel (baptised Georg Friedrich Händel) spent his early life developing his talent in his homeland. It was not until the early 18th century that Handel began to

BBC Music Magazine

6 min read

When the Irish composer Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest received its UK stage premiere in 2013, the Royal Opera House’s then director of opera Kasper Holten called it ‘the first great comic opera of the 21st century’. A certain degree

Country Life

2 min read

AT this time of year, Messiah is everywhere. In London alone, it will be given its 567th live outing since 1872 at the Royal Albert Hall. Yet its composer envisaged it as a piece for Easter. Only the first part of the oratorio is concerned with the b

BBC Music Magazine

6 min read

‘Youknow exactly what it is as soon as you hear the opening drum roll,’ says Major Stewart Halliday, director of music, Coldstream Guards. ‘It captures the imagination right from the start.’ And the melody that follows has been capturing imaginations

Tractor & Machinery

2 min read

Well, the last few months have seen the rally scene come back to what we would normally expect, or near enough, with lots of exciting debuts of tractors that were planned to be out in 2020, but which, owing to Covid-19, are only appearing now. Thank

Country Life

6 min read

THEY are the ghosts of Christmas past and present: the barely considered wordsmiths whose lines adorn the time-honoured favourite carols that coax even the most vocally timid of us into a wintry warble. Most of us, however, have a passing acquaintanc

BBC Music Magazine

16 min read

When, in 1904, the German critic Oscar Schmitz described Britain as ‘Das Land ohne Musik’ (The land without music), he was possibly trying to stir. However, he did have a bit of a point – for all the efforts of Parry, Sullivan and co, Britain’s outpu

Prog

1 min read

Geordies’ brilliance shines on vinyl reissue of their breakthrough second LP. Though the bedrock of Lindisfarne’s appeal lay in the distinctive, politicised songwriting of charismatic frontman Alan Hull, it was Top 5 single Meet Me On The Corner – pe

The American Scholar

4 min read

Pegasus Books, 448 pp., $28.95 ONE OF THE GREAT assimilation stories in the history of music involves the transformation of Georg Friedrich Händl, fledgling German composer from the city of Halle, into George Frideric Handel, naturalized British sub

BBC Music Magazine

13 min read

The Proms have never been a simple concert series: they outgrew that almost from the start, turning into a statement of the nation’s musical credentials – with peculiar status as a platform for what counted as significant at any time from 1895, when

BBC Music Magazine

3 min read

Building a Library is broadcast on Radio 3 at 9.30am each Saturday as part of Record Review. A highlights podcast is available on BBC Sounds. According to the music historian Charles Burney, who knew him well, ‘Handel’s look was somewhat heavy and so

The Oldie

3 min read

With a coronation on, I found myself taking down from the shelves Paul McCreesh's fascinating two-disc anthology An English Coronation: 1902-1953. Cast in the form of the ceremony itself, it marries the coronation liturgy with some of the best music

History Scotland

8 min read

In the 19th century, the music hall was the preeminent form of popular entertainment in Britain. At its peak, it employed over 80,000 and entertained 25 million people a year. Springing from the back rooms of pubs in the 1830s and 1840s, by the 1870s

Country Life

4 min read

CHRISTMAS is rich with customs. We each have our own. Presents, for instance, must be opened at a fixed point: pre-dawn for children, dusk for weary cooks. Alongside tickets for the panto or The Nutcracker, divisive boardgames and a lone tangerine in

New Zealand Listener

3 min read

One of the most defining if divisive moments in Aldous Harding’s international career came when she appeared on Jools Holland’s British music television show Later in 2017. With only spare piano accompaniment and a few bodily gestures, Harding delive

Evening Standard

4 min read

In the nineteen years since its inception, Flow has become a festival transformed. Emerging from the hazy jazz and techno clubs of Helsinki in 2004, its first home was an abandoned railway warehouse, with early crowds made up of just a few thousand

Classic Rock

3 min read

Back in the early 2000s, H.e.a.t were a bunch of kids in Upplands Vasby, Sweden, dreaming of being somewhere else. Somewhere with palm trees instead of snow, where Def Leppard and Iron Maiden ruled instead of Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. S

The Oldie

3 min read

Janan Ganesh, a writer on the Financial Times, has claimed there is a shortage of reactionary voices in Britain today. Mr Ganesh could nominate only one true reactionary in British public life: the commentator Peter Hitchens. There just aren't enough

BBC Music Magazine

3 min read

In 1900, Edward Elgar was flushed with the success of the Enigma Variations, premiered just one year earlier. After years of musical struggle, things were looking up for this jobbing, provincial violin teacher. Over the course of the previous decade,

Country Life

7 min read

A is for ADVENT. Early versions of the Advent calendar saw cupboard doors marked with chalk, God descending to earth on ladders (one rung per day) and Christmas clocks counting down, tick after tock. German publisher Gerhard Lang produced the first c

UNCUT

3 min read

RECORDING “Heroes” in West Berlin in the summer of 1977, David Bowie and Brian Eno felt they’d been upstaged in their search for a new sound when they heard Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” on the radio. Years later, Bowie remembered Eno telling him that

The Oldie

4 min read

Soldiers always get straight to the point. I was about to give a talk, at the Belgian Embassy in London, about new Van Dyck discoveries, with Justin Davies, Van Dyck scholar and co-founder of the Jordaens Van Dyck Panel Paintings Project. In the proj

The Oldie

3 min read

FESTIVALS IN 2022 ‘Normal service has been resumed,’ rejoices pianist Iain Burnside, artistic director of Ludlow’s annual English Song Weekend (8th-10th April). Being a prudent soul, he adds, ‘As I type these words with one hand, I cross the fingers

Classic Rock

1 min read

All The World Is A Stage is as you like it: Slade banging it out with loose, licentious ferocity, so brutish and raucous that you begin to question whether punk needed to happen, and you keep checking that a fleet of jumbo jets hasn’t landed in your

The Big Issue

3 min read

From ABBA to Robyn, Avicii, and super-producer Max Martin – a songwriter only topped by Lennon and McCartney when it comes to scoring US No 1 singles – why is Sweden so extraordinarily good at making pop music? It’s a question I’ve pondered a great d

BBC Music Magazine

6 min read

Has any musician been more devoted to the cause of British music than Sir Dan Godfrey (1868-1939)? Henry Wood, with his Queen’s Hall Orchestra, played his part across the same period, not least via the Proms. However, the less flamboyant Godfrey – st

Evening Standard

1 min read

Vince Power, the veteran music promoter who died on Saturday aged 76, always made a point of refusing to wind down. Over the course of a career beginning with the opening of his first music venue the Mean Fiddler in 1982, an unglamorous but cosy Harl

New Zealand Listener

2 min read

It was announced recently that the UK’s global share of recorded music had declined from 17% in 2015 to 12% last year. The drop reflects the improving reach of nations such as South Korea, with its K-pop phenomenon, and it still leaves Britain holdin

BBC Music Magazine

1 min read

Italian opera was on the slide in London during the 1730s and Handel’s fortunes were in a tailspin. Fortunately, the composer had something up his sleeve. Back in 1718, he’d turned the biblical tale of Esther into an English masque to be played befor