Australia’s first stradivarius

Kasper Holten, the Director of Opera at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden since 2011, has announced that he will be stepping down from this role in 2017. Sydney audiences will be familiar with his work from his direction of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin for Opera Australia in 2014. Read the feature in Gramophone.

Tom Service of The Guardian begins a year – long journey which explores the symphony and how it changed our world. The word was first used in the 16th century and referred to music for various combinations of voices and instruments, like Gabrieli’s Sacrae symphoniae, 1597. The symphony as we know it today took shape…