Flora Willson
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Articles by Flora Willson
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra / Wigglesworth review – phrasing with hospital corners
Updated Thu, October 22, 2026 at 1:27 PM UTC Detailed and sensitive conducting: Mark Wigglesworth with BSO at the Lighthouse, Poole.Photograph: Mark Allan On paper, it was a curious programme: Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra and Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, followed post-interval by Adès’s Märchentänze and Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. A calculated mix of more and less familiar works, certainly – but an otherwise unlikely foursome.
The Alonetimes review – frenetic, funny and exhilarating music theatre
Updated Tue, October 20, 2026 at 10:41 AM UTC Fleetingly poetic … The Alonetimes at Schwarzman Centre, Oxford.Photograph: Cyril Marcilhacy Six performers navigate a disjointed world of online slang, loneliness and absurdity in the UK premiere of Jennifer Walshe and Philip Venables’ thrillingly original collaboration As we found our seats, a druidic figure wearing a string of vapes as a necklace sat on stage swathed in white fabric and smoke, emitting close-miked mouth noises amid a rising...
RLPO/Hickox review – a made-to-measure clarinet collaboration two decades in the pipeline
Twenty years ago, a teenager called Mark Simpson won both the BBC Young Musician of the Year and BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year; he commissioned a short piece for clarinet from Gavin Higgins, another young composer. It was Higgins's first paid work and he promised to thank Simpson by writing him a clarinet concerto.
RLPO/Hickox review – a made-to-measure clarinet collaboration two decades in the pipeline
RLPO/Hickox review – a made-to-measure clarinet collaboration two decades in the pipeline Sun, 18 October 2026 at 5:07 pm UTC Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google.
RLPO/Hickox review – a made-to-measure clarinet collaboration two decades in the pipeline
A promise kept … Gavin Higgins and Mark Simpson on stage with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Photograph: Gareth Jones Twenty years ago, a teenager called Mark Simpson won both the BBC Young Musician of the Year and BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year; he commissioned a short piece for clarinet from Gavin Higgins, another young composer. It was Higgins’s first paid work and he promised to thank Simpson by writing him a clarinet concerto.
RLPO/Hickox review – a made-to-measure clarinet collaboration two decades in the pipeline
Updated Sun, October 18, 2026 at 5:09 PM UTC A promise kept … Gavin Higgins and Mark Simpson on stage with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.Photograph: Gareth Jones Mark Simpson delivers gauzy luminosity and punchy tone in Gavin Higgins’s exquisite new work, conducted with spellbinding pacing by rising star Adam Hickox alongside spirited accounts of Britten and Stravinsky Twenty years ago, a teenager called Mark Simpson won both the BBC Young Musician of the Year and BBC...
Parsifal review – bunkers, CCTV and fembots in elusive vision of Wagner’s mystical masterpiece
Updated Fri, October 2, 2026 at 11:32 AM UTC An appalling, wild-eyed must-see … Christian Gerhaher as Amfortas in Parsifal at the Royal Opera House.Photograph: Marc Brenner Grail, wound, spear: some of the narrative trappings of Wagner’s final opera are immediately recognisable as symbolic. Others – woman, saviour, chastity, seduction, suffering, death – are harder to pin down, lodged in the half-light between the literal and the metaphorical.
‘Good music is good music, and most music is not!’ As he hits 90, master minimalist Steve Reich looks back
Steve Reich is not yet 90 but the celebrations have already begun, with the world premiere of his new piece for large ensemble, In All Your Ways, at the Edinburgh festival last month and a late-night concert at the BBC Proms. But when I ask this most supremely influential of living composers how he feels about becoming a nonagenarian on 3 October, Reich is coy. “I haven’t quite got there yet,” he says. “I don’t want to dot the i before I even get there.
Phaedra Ensemble: The Music of Meredith Monk review – fleeting rough edges amid polished beauty
Updated Fri, September 18, 2026 at 3:14 PM UTC Injecting colour: Phaedra Ensemble at Kings Place, London.Photograph: Monika S. Jakubowska There’s no one quite like Meredith Monk. So often grouped with her lionised contemporaries Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and La Monte Young, she is 83 to their 90-odd years and sports long plaited hair as reliably as Reich wears a baseball cap.
Munich Philharmonic/Lahav Shani/Martha Argerich review – the great pianist gleams
Munich Philharmonic/Lahav Shani/Martha Argerich review – the great pianist gleams Sun, September 6, 2026 at 10:53 a.m. UTC Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Gales of whooping … Martha Argerich and conductor and pianist Lahav Shani play Ravel for an encore.Photograph: Chris Christodoulou/BBC The international heavyweights have been coming thick and fast as this year's BBC Proms hurtles towards its close.
Munich Philharmonic/Lahav Shani/Martha Argerich review – the great pianist gleams
The international heavyweights have been coming thick and fast as this year's BBC Proms hurtles towards its close. The Munich Philharmonic arrived with new chief conductor Lahav Shani hot on the heels of two acclaimed concerts from their Berlin counterparts. Once conducted by Gustav Mahler and Wilhelm Furtwängler, the Munich Phil is an unequivocally venerable orchestra. But the Berliners remain a hard act to follow.
Munich Philharmonic/Lahav Shani/Martha Argerich review – the great pianist gleams
Munich Philharmonic/Lahav Shani/Martha Argerich review – the great pianist gleams Sun, 6 September 2026 at 10:53 am UTC Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Gales of whooping … Martha Argerich and conductor and pianist Lahav Shani play Ravel for an encore.Photograph: Chris Christodoulou/BBC The international heavyweights have been coming thick and fast as this year's BBC Proms hurtles towards its close.
Munich Philharmonic/Lahav Shani/Martha Argerich review – the great pianist gleams
Updated Sun, September 6, 2026 at 10:54 AM UTC Gales of whooping … Martha Argerich and conductor and pianist Lahav Shani play Ravel for an encore.Photograph: Chris Christodoulou/BBC The international heavyweights have been coming thick and fast as this year’s BBC Proms hurtles towards its close. The Munich Philharmonic arrived with new chief conductor Lahav Shani hot on the heels of two acclaimed concerts from their Berlin counterparts.
Berlin Philharmonic/ Petrenko/ Hadelich review – flawless musical beauty Original
It's the clarity that hits you first. The soft thuds of timpani that open Beethoven's Violin Concerto landed from the back of the stage with the immediacy of taps on the shoulder, quietly urgent. The string sound was simultaneously luminous and translucent. Pizzicato bass-lines were shaped as if the main event and bubbled upwards through the rest of the texture.
Oslo Philharmonic/Gražinytė-Tyla/Kopatchinskaja review – weapons-grade charisma and anarchic delight Original
There are the violinists whose instruments seem barely relevant, their tone appearing to emanate mysteriously from the ether. And there are the violinists whose music-making is audibly rooted in the physical contact between fingers, bow and string. Patricia Kopatchinskaja is among the latter – and Stravinsky's 1931 Violin Concerto is an ideal expressive fit for this full-body performer.
Academy of St Martin in the Fields/Marquise Gilmore review – bassoon earns its spotlight in Thea Musgrave’s Out of the Darkness
Updated Mon, August 24, 2026 at 1:14 PM UTC Lyrical … Amy Harman plays bassoon with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields at the BBC Proms.Photograph: Chris Christodoulou/BBC Amid this year’s crop of Proms premieres, one stood out a mile – long before any of us had heard a note of it. Out of the Darkness is a new bassoon concerto by the 98-year-old Scottish composer Thea Musgrave, whose music was first heard at the Proms in 1960.
Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra/Wilson review – white-hot intensity as Verdi Requiem shakes St Paul’s vast dome
‘Ukraine’s artistic heroes’ … the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra with soloists Natalya Romaniw, Natalie Lewis, René Barbera and Jongmin Park at St Paul's Cathedral. Photograph: @fmarshallphoto/Frances Marshall There were climaxes in Verdi’s Requiem that would surely have registered on a seismometer as they gathered into a thrillingly elemental roar before dissipating as a series of echoed convulsions into the vast dome above.
Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra/Wilson review – white-hot intensity as Verdi Reqiuem shakes St Paul’s vast dome Original
There were climaxes in Verdi's Requiem that would surely have registered on a seismometer as they gathered into a thrillingly elemental roar before dissipating as a series of echoed convulsions into the vast dome above. There were choral susurrations that swept over the orchestra, exhortations delivered in crisp consonants.
LA Phil/Dudamel; Fantasia Orchestra / Fetherstonhaugh/Glennie reviews – high-contrast programming
Updated Wed, 12 August 2026 at 12:20 pm UTC Good clean fun … Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Royal Albert Hall.Photograph: Chris Christodoulou This evening was, in a sense, a tale of two orchestras. On one hand, the international heavyweight, returning to the Proms for the first time in more than 20 years. On the other, the rapidly ascendant homegrown outfit founded while its members were still at school, already making its fourth Proms appearance.
‘This is asking a lot of the buttocks’: my 23-hour Wagner marathon on a rock hard seat in a heatwave
Liszt and Bruckner were there from the start. Debussy, Mahler and Puccini all subsequently made the journey. So did writers from Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann to WEB Du Bois, not to mention choreographer Sergei Diaghilev, anarchist Emma Goldman, British fascist Diana Mosley (wife of Oswald) and – most notoriously and fanatically – Adolf Hitler. Culturally and politically, Germany's Bayreuth festival doesn't so much have baggage as its own industrial-scale luggage hangar.
National Youth Orchestra/Adès review – assured young musicians end their season all guns blazing
Three big pieces on the programme. 160 teenage musicians almost all on stage throughout. No choreography , no body percussion and not a kazoo in sight . By National Youth Orchestra standards, this Proms appearance – the all-guns-blazing finale of the cohort's year together – was positively straight-laced. Yes, there were still whoops when friends and family members greeted individual musicians as they all poured on to the stage.
National Youth Orchestra/Adès review – assured young musicians end their season all guns blazing
Updated Sun, 9 August 2026 at 12:11 pm UTC Full force … Thomas Adès conducting the National Youth Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall.Photograph: Chris Christodoulou/BBC Three big pieces on the programme. 160 teenage musicians almost all on stage throughout. No choreography, no body percussion and not a kazoo in sight. By National Youth Orchestra standards, this Proms appearance – the all-guns-blazing finale of the cohort’s year together – was positively straight-laced.
Ring Cycle review – AI staging dispenses with drama to create banal bric-a-brac
Unveiled the same week in which tech company Anthropic admitted that its AI model Claude had gone rogue during testing, Bayreuth festival's new AI-generated staging of Wagner's four-part Ring of the Nibelungen is at least timely. But anyone who assumes that the cycle's obsession with knowledge, power and possession might make it an ideal forum for reflection on AI as a major contemporary frontier will be disappointed, as will anyone hopeful about AI's creative potential within opera.
Parsifal review – blood, lust and goth energy fuel Wagner’s Grail quest
Updated Sun, 2 August 2026 at 12:47 pm UTC All action … camera operators film scenes with Parsifal and the flower maidens for onstage screens.Photograph: Bayreuther Festspiele There is the grail, the spear, the wound that will not heal. There is a solemn, life-sustaining ritual. There’s a false paradise and an outsider who will redeem all. Even by Wagner’s standards, Parsifal is a heavily symbolic work – and nowhere more than at Bayreuth.
Rienzi review – Wagner’s early opera makes its Bayreuth debut as a frenzied contemporary election drama
Updated Mon, 27 July 2026 at 12:22 pm UTC Too much happening … Rienzi at Bayreuth festival.Photograph: Enrico Nawrath It was Adolf Hitler’s favourite opera – and thus vital to a historical chapter that Germany’s Bayreuth festival long preferred to avoid. But Rienzi has finally arrived at Wagner’s symbolic HQ, opening the 150th anniversary season as an exception to the festival’s rigid canon of his 10 “mature” works. Rienzi’s problems are unavoidable.
The importance of being earnest review – gloriously madcap opera achieves new heights of delirium
Anyone who has seen the opera before will recognise the tall rack of white dinner plates, stacked and primed for you-know-what. Anyone who knows Oscar Wilde's play will recognise its punchlines, transposed by composer Gerald Barry into a kind of staccato mashup between speech and singing. But in Jack Furness's new production of Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest for Garsington Opera, familiarity is otherwise avoided.
Resurrecting Marina: The Rediscovery of Giordano's Lost Opera - Gramophone
An early opera by Umberto Giordano which was previously thought lost has been recorded by Decca. Flora Willson hears from those behind the detective work and the performance In May 1889, a 21-year old Italian composer entered a competition run by a music publisher for a new one-act opera and didn’t win. He wasn’t even one of the official runners-up, instead coming sixth out of 73 entrants. End of story, you might assume.
Tristan und Isolde review – Wagner in concert performance sees Pappano and the LSO at their finest
Updated Thu, 2 July 2026 at 12:04 pm UTC A blistering Tristan… Clay Hilley with Gyula Oendt (Kurwenal) at the London Symphony Orchestra’s concert performance of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in the Barbican Hall.Photograph: Mark Allan The London Symphony Orchestra’s regular concert performances of complete operas have become something of an institution. Janáček’s The Makropulos Affair and Strauss’s Salome had critics raving about high-definition orchestral textures and brutally streamlined drama.
Billy Budd review – Clayton’s Vere is the devastating heart of vivid staging
Updated Mon, 29 June 2026 at 11:21 am UTC A painful snapshot of overkeen youth … Thomas Mole (centre) as Billy Budd at Glyndebourne.Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian Brutalist grey, its deck gently curved, HMS Indomitable looms over Michael Grandage’s production of Britten’s Billy Budd. Half-skeleton, half-cage, the ship is relentlessly claustrophobic, its hard edges softened only by coils of rope, hammocks and Paule Constable’s subtle, painterly lighting.
Brahms’ Last Concert review – OAE and Emelyanychev take audience back to 1897
Updated Thu, 25 June 2026 at 6:47 pm UTC Well-oiled … cellist Steven Isserlis and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev perform Vienna 1897: Brahms' Last Concert.Photograph: Mark Allan Every period-instrument outfit has its shtick – its own version of what “historically informed performance” might mean.
Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) review – Tyshawn Sorey’s meditations yield their mysteries slowly
Tue, 23 June 2026 at 12:23 pm UTC Intensely characterful … Ruth Gibson and Davóne Tines, conducted by Tyshawn Sorey, perform Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) in St Giles' Cripplegate.Photograph: Mark Allan Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) by Pulitzer-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey demands patience.
Aldeburgh festival roundup – Tansy Davies and Freya Waley-Cohen premieres, plus blistering Shostakovich
Mon, 22 June 2026 at 11:16 am UTC Multitasking … Colin Currie sits among his tubular bells, drums and upturned bin.Photograph: BPA Percussionists are classical music's original multitaskers. But even by their standards, Colin Currie is a virtuosic outlier.
Carl Maria von Weber at 200 - Gramophone
To mark 200 years since the death of Carl Maria von Weber, Flora Willson argues that he is undervalued and deserves to be seen as a pivotal figure in 19th-century musical development Geniuses are often celebrated for being ahead of their time, but in 1936, the musicologist Richard Gorer wrote, ‘Weber can lay no claim to the title as he is entirely typical of the age in which he lived.’ Not just typical, either – but rather, Gorer suggests, ‘the representative figure of the Romantic movement...
L’Orfeo review – Kentridge’s exhilarating creativity animates compelling Monteverdi
Mon, 15 June 2026 at 2:30 pm UTC Captivating … Krystian Adam (Orfeo), far left, Roseline Wilkens (Euridice), centre and Francesca Aspromonte (La Musica/Euridice), right, at desk, in L'Orfeo at Glyndebourne.Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian There is a lot to look at in Glyndebourne's first production of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo. Directed by William Kentridge with a set by Sabine Theunissen, this staging is rooted in an artist's studio and borne along by objects and images.
Danish String Quartet review – captivating performance from a world-class group
Flora Willson Tue, June 9, 2026 at 2:37 p.m. UTC 2 min read Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Outrageously classy … (l to r) Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen (violin), Frederik Øland Olsen (violin), Asbjørn Nørgaard (viola) and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin (cello) of the Danish String Quartet at Wigmore Hall.Photograph: Tom Wright / Wigmore Hall A hushed chord sustained by the second violin, viola and cello.
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