The Independent

Independent podcast: Saimir Pirgu

Quality voices will always be a rare and valued commodity. The young Albanian tenor Saimir Pirgu falls into that category.

The Guardian

Saint and sinner: the Nelson Mandela opera

Tribesman, activist, icon – all the phases of Nelson Mandela’s life are o display in a new opera.

Gramophone

Bach cantata manuscript goes on public display at Christie’s in London

Rare chance to view Bach’s musical hand before ale on June 13.

New York Times

Video Preserves Hints of Future for a Director

Just out of Harvard, the director Peter Sellars made his name in the early 1980s. But what do you do when your defining work is made before you’re 30? An answer is found in Mr. Sellars’s haunting 2010 staging of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion”.

Arts Journal – Slipped disc

Russians squeaks it in tight Nielsen contest

Olga Volkova, a pupil of Zakha Bron in Cologne, took first prize in the Carl Nielsen competition in Odense.

Eminent Italian maestro is dead

We’re receiving reports of the death of Piero Bellugi, music director of the RAI orchestra from 1967 and, until his death, artistic director of the opera in Palermo, Sicily.

The Times

Salonen, bringer of interactive conducting at the Science Museum

Do you ever dream of guiding the the Philharmonia through a full-blooded performance of The Planets? Dream no longer.