Hugh Morris
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(He/Him)
- Writer, Culture Journalist and Critic, Freelance
- Journalist, VAN Magazine
Durham, London, Manchester
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@vanmusicmag editor and writer elsewhere. Loves a typo / views: model's own. hugh@van-verlag.com
Articles by Hugh Morris
Chasing the Ace
In Poznań, Poland on a recent Tuesday night, the Chinese violinist Meng Zou played the second movement of the Sibelius Violin Concerto with a burning, overdriven tone. The outer movements featured some inconsistencies in articulation, and he didn’t fully climb into the concerto in the way many of the standout violinists do on record. Zou had made it to the semi-finals of the 17th Henry Wieniawski Violin Competition. I didn’t think he’d make it much further.
Concerts Good, Recordings Bad
In “The Yellow Tie,” a biopic about the Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache whose premiere I attended in London on Wednesday, things start badly and get steadily worse. We begin with old Celi (John Malkovich) discussing a future engagement with a group of Japanese record executives over lunch at his French estate. To his dismay, they have included a clause agreeing to the commercial release of his recordings. “The economics of our business is changing,” one offers.
All Fired Up
Here is a sample of the headlines on articles published by Cadenza.work about the turmoil at the Boston Symphony Orchestra: “Boston Is on Fire. Its Orchestras Are Dying.” “They Fired the Best Conductor in America. The Evidence Points to Ideology.” “Fire Chad Smith. The Memo Is the Confession. The Orchestra Needs to Fight Back.” To continue reading, subscribe now. Unlimited access to our weekly issues and archives. Already have an account? … has been an editor at VAN since 2015.
At 98, the Composer Thea Musgrave Is Still Learning
In a London hotel room last winter, the composer Thea Musgrave ate cheese and biscuits and drank red wine from a mug as she asked the bassoonist Amy Harman a series of searching questions about her instrument. Harman replied about what she loved, what she found difficult, the sweet spots in her range, and her instrument’s idiosyncrasies. Then, she started to walk while playing her bassoon.
“Like, What The Hell Are We Doing Here?”
A few weeks ago, the conductor Robert Ames announced he was stepping down as co-artistic director and co-principal conductor of the London Contemporary Orchestra. It was a bit of a shock. Conductors come and go with major orchestras, but Ames, who co-founded the LCO 18 years ago, was synonymous with the group.
A New Album Doubles as a Manifesto for Listening Closely
A New Album Doubles as a Manifesto for Listening Closely Sarah Davachi’s “The Will of Tongues” is a collection of music that refuses extremes and requires undivided attention. The composer Sarah Davachi, on organ, whose new album “The Will of Tongues” is out now.Credit...Franco Adams Aug. 30, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET Too often the way we take in music is either quick-fire skipping or zoned-out, distracted listening.
“My only saved Google search is for Henri Dutilleux,” the D.J., producer and composer Floating Points said at his home in London. “I’m always looking — like, can I go to Finland next weekend to hear his music?” Floating Points, whose real name is Sam Shepherd, keeps a pristine graphic score for Ligeti’s “Artikulations” in his home studio, alongside other 20th-century masterpieces by Messiaen, Stravinsky and Takemitsu.
Hear How a Pianist Stacks Variations on Top of Variations
Robert Schumann’s final work — “Geistervariationen,” or “Ghost Variations” — is at the heart of the pianist and composer Joseph Havlat’s thoughtfully constructed new album, “Sinner, Don’t Let This Harvest Pass.” “Geistervariationen” isn’t one of Schumann’s most celebrated piano works, partly because of its late publication. (Initially withheld by his family after his death in 1856, it was eventually published in 1939.) But it’s also just an enigmatic piece.
Add to playlist: the fluid club deconstructions of Stolen Velour, Floco and Aria SL and the week’s best new tracks
From South LondonRecommended if you like FKA twigs, James K, Anysia KimUp next Debut album Underlight out now There are many ways to deconstruct club music. On Bristol label Illegal Data, releases might take explosive approaches to scary (Ship Sket) and whimsical (Mun Sing) extremes. More recently, the same label finds Stolen Velour, Floco and Aria SL filling the club chest-high with liquid: you hear elements sink, dissolve, or float past serenely on the surface.
KPIs by Candlelight
Fever, developer of the Candlelight Concert series, is one of the most prominent voices in our space. With 8.2 million followers on Instagram, the Candlelight Concert series is also a dominant force in classical digital marketing. Even if you’ve not attended one of their many concerts, you’ll know what they look like: a quartet of musicians in a large, old space, surrounded by hundreds of yellow-hued LED candles, playing music from Vivaldi to Taylor Swift.
Edvard Grieg, Aura Farmer
On approach to Troldhaugen, a straight, wide avenue splits into spaghetti paths: down to the shoreside grave, up to the villa, left to the glass-fronted concert hall, and further left to the composing hut. Tracing each route is like walking through a video game landscape. This is World of Grieg, a place where footsteps slow, becoming reverent. To continue reading, subscribe now. Unlimited access to our weekly issues and archives. Already have an account?
A Conducting ‘Force to Be Reckoned With’ Comes Into His Own
Few conductors have a more quintessentially English résumé than Ed Gardner. He was a boy chorister at Gloucester Cathedral, then followed a familiar route into British musical society, through Eton College, Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music. Many of Gardner’s big breaks were in England: as an assistant to Mark Elder at the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, and as the music director of the Glyndebourne tour and English National Opera.
Lucy Liyou: Mr Cobra review – an arresting trip through the volatile emotions of a predatory relationship
Mr Cobra opens with Korean American experimental musician Lucy Liyou’s central character, Babygirl, eerily beckoning her lover while piano shrapnel assaults a barren canvas. Over the course of the record, Liyou’s textures swell and dissipate, swerving into disco cuts and a Taylor Swift skit, then collapsing into farmyard sounds and text-to-speech streams of consciousness.
Welcome 2 Shorworld
In 2024, we reported on the meteoric rise of a composer named Alexey Shor. His music, which resembled the kind of music theory homework that gets Bs and Cs (and that multiple musicians compared to material produced by AI) was suddenly everywhere: in Valetta, Yerevan, and Dubai, but also in London, New York and Amsterdam.
The Numbers Game
Skip to content The Classical Mixtape concert at the Southbank Centre, London • Photo © Pete Woodhead It begins with Timothée Chalamet’s recent offhand remark about opera, because of course it does. Enter the code sent to your email. Email address Enter your password Sign in by entering the code we sent to , or clicking the magic link in the email.
Stand By Your Man
“If you want to be an opinionated columnist or a partisan campaigner on social media,” the BBC’s director general Tim Davie wrote in October 2020, “then that is a valid choice, but you should not be working at the BBC.” When Davie took over from Tony Hall as director general in 2020 (and in the wake of prominent BBC presenters voicing their political opinions on social media, most notably former “Match of the Day” presenter Gary Lineker), Davie doubled down the corporation’s social media...
‘Theory of Flames’ Dives Down the Rabbit Hole of Paranoia
To promote Michel van der Aa’s latest film-opera hybrid, “Theory of Flames,” his production company sent a man into the center of Amsterdam wearing a doomer-style sandwich board decorated with a line from the show: “Reality doesn’t go away just because you stop believing in it.” A clear, unquestionable statement like that is rare in “Theory of Flames,” which premieres at the Dutch National Opera on Friday.
Add to playlist: the cliche-correcting medieval music of Idrîsî Ensemble and the week’s best new tracks
From London via Corsica/Occitania Recommended if you like Arooj Aftab, Maria Callas, the choral tragedy of Prioritise Pleasure-era Self Esteem Up next New single Dieus Sal la Terra out now Idrîsî Ensemble are a useful corrective to the stereotyping of medieval music as smooth, pious and sleepy. Hearing the howls of this London-based group – sometimes powered by up to 19 members – you’re reminded of song’s inexhaustible capacity for conjuring fresh pain.
Sin City Drifting
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” is a work of relentless cynicism, where three runaway convicts build a Sin City that peaks then crashes. The opera also charts the gradual souring of a philosophy through liberal ideals, to the libertarian pursuit of freedom at all cost, to an authoritarian crackdown on pleasure through rules-based order, concluding with a descent into capital punishment and public discontent.
Did This Conductor Organize Meetings with Young Women for Jeffrey Epstein?
“I found a great girl for your next stay in Paris,” the conductor Frédéric Chaslin wrote to Jeffrey Epstein in September 2013. Chaslin told the financier, who first pleaded guilty of solicitation of prostitution and of solicitation of prostitution with a minor in 2008, that the girl was a 21-year-old philosophy student who spoke three languages fluently and reminded him of Roman Polanski’s wife, Emmanuelle Seigner.
Add to playlist: The dark fog of Los Angeles saxophonist Aaron Shaw and the week's best new tracks
From Los Angeles Recommend if you like Miguel Atwood Ferguson, Shabaka Hutchings's flute music, the Coltranes Up next Debut album And So It Is released 13 February For woodwind players, breath is everything: the lifeforce of artistry, the thing that furnishes sound with personality. But a few years ago, the Los Angeles saxophonist Aaron Shaw realised he was becoming increasingly breathless.
‘I’d never heard anything like it’: the prepared piano revelations of jazz star Jessica Williams
Flipping through the jazz section on a visit to his local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked every bit the quintessential DIY release. “The labels had come off the tape,” he says.
Add to playlist: Tristan Perich and James McVinnie’s piece for organ and 100 loudspeakers, plus the week’s best new tracks
From New York and London Recommended if you like Kali Malone, Éliane Radigue, Caterina Barbieri, Burial’s Comafields Up next Infinity Gradient album out 21 November There’s something about the pipe organ that keeps experimental musicians going back for more. No other acoustic instrument pierces and shakes the air in quite the same way. Composer-performers such as Kali Malone, Jonny Greenwood, Ellen Arkbro, Sarah Davachi and Kit Downes are just the start.
Add to playlist: the crisp conviction and poetic intrigue of Feeo, and the week’s best new tracks
From London Recommended if you like Tirzah, Loraine James, Space Afrika Up next Debut album Goodness out 10 October Over the past three years, vocalist Theodora Laird and bassist Caius Williams have built a committed hub for improvised music at Grain, a residency held at Avalon cafe in south Bermondsey.
‘Mars’ Takes A.I., Pronatalism and Hustle Culture to Space
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. If contemporary music sometimes feels like a perilous glacier to scale, then the works by the Irish composer Jennifer Walshe are more like climbing walls, with an abundance of reachable footholds to get you started and handholds to grasp if you get lost.
The Royal Ballet & Opera is being hypocritical on Palestine • VAN Magazine
On Saturday, Oliver Mears, the director of opera at London’s Royal Ballet and Opera, walked on stage at the curtain call of “Il Trovatore” to try to take down a Palestine flag that was unveiled by a dancer. Mears began to aggressively rip the flag from the performer’s hands, then stormed off the stage when he was unsuccessful. To continue reading, subscribe now. Unlimited access to our weekly issues and archives. Already have an account?
“A Call To Action, Disguised As A Symphony”
At the Barbican Centre in early May, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO), the City of London Choir and London Voices premiered a 49-minute piece titled “Lim Cosmic Rhapsody.” Their recording of the piece, which featured pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, had just been released on Decca Classics, and the performance marked the first outing for score, published by Wise Music Group.
"The Protecting Veil," reviewed at the bar • VAN Magazine
In a staging of John Tavener’s “The Protecting Veil” at Clapton’s Round Chapel at Spitalfields Music Festival on Sunday, director Anna Morrissey led musicians and dancers from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in an expressive set of stage pictures, loosely following the scheme of Tavener’s work.
Lawrence Power Wants You to Pay Attention to the Viola
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. A Musician on a Mission to Make Us Pay Attention to the Viola Lawrence Power’s instrument has been overlooked throughout its history. He has made a career of changing that.
Gagged!
Contracts seen by VAN show that the management of Northern Ballet has inserted a confidentiality clause into the agreements for its freelance musicians. To continue reading, subscribe now. Unlimited access to our weekly issues and archives.
Kings Place faces backlash over Lockheed Martin links • VAN Magazine
On May 26, Art Not Arms posted an open letter to Kings Place, the London classical music venue and conference center, that called for the cancellation of the upcoming Defence in Space Conference in October. This conference is sponsored by arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin. The open letter noted that Lockheed Martin is involved in the production of F-35 fighter jets currently being used by the Israeli military in Gaza.
The Wire Issue 497
July 2025 Subscribers: read this issue online. Subscribe to the magazine. Buy issue 497. Inside our brand new issue: Haruomi Hosono: The exotica explorer and YMO founder has found his voice in a late career renaissance. By James Hadfield.Plus: Japanese exotica: A user’s guide by David Toop Bromp Treb: Film maker and musician Neil ‘Cloaca’ Young has learned from the possibility of failure.
Kazuki Yamada on Birmingham, Berlin, and bins • VAN Magazine
Phoning in from Frankfurt—he’s there getting a visa ahead of his conducting debut at La Scala—Kazuki Yamada radiates positivity down the Zoom call. An extremely popular conductor in Birmingham, where he is currently City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s music director and artistic advisor, it was recently announced that Yamada would succeed Robin Ticciati as the Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, beginning in 2026.
The gradual unfoldings of Catherine Lamb • VAN Magazine
Both Catherine Lamb and I arrive for our interview in a west Berlin park slightly distracted, and the universe works to make us more so. First, a bird in a bush behind our bench insists on everyone hearing its loud, virtuosic song; we swiftly relocate to the grass in the middle of the square. Then, a man approaches us asking for water for his dogs; we give it to him, he leaves, and we try to carry on where we left off.
Komische Oper's "Don Giovanni," reviewed in the bar • VAN Magazine
On Sunday, a new “Don Giovanni,” the final staging of Kirill Serebrennikov’s Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, premiered at the Komische Oper in Berlin. It imagined the title character as being taken through the bardo throughout the opera, following the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and substituted movements from Mozart’s Requiem for the work’s usual finale. After the four-hour performance, VAN editors Hugh Morris and Jeffrey Arlo Brown convened for white wine in Kreuzberg to discuss the production.
"Daphnis and Chloe" at the Southbank Centre, reviewed • VAN Magazine
Last night, the Southbank Centre launched its new classical music festival: Multitudes, a space designed to bring different artforms closer together. Over the next few weeks, new video works by William Kentridge and Kirill Sebrennikov accompany Shostakovich symphonies, Igor Levit and Marina Abramović perform Satie’s “Vexations,” and Tom Morris directs a semi-staged performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony.
Against The Grain: Hugh Morris has had enough 'jazzy'
Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera Festen was too big to fail, and in many ways it didn’t. A luxury cast with considerable strength in depth excelled through 90 minutes of relentlessly bleak action. That a brand new opera felt the right length for its subject – and could have even been slightly longer – was a rarer thing still. There was even a laugh out loud moment, as tenor Allan Clayton burst through a door, Big Bird style. If only the music had been better.
These Top Republican Donors Also Donate To Classical Music • VAN Magazine
In May 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, many American classical music institutions joined what appeared to be a society-wide reckoning on racism. The Minnesota Orchestra commissioned a work in Floyd’s memory, by composer Carlos Simon and librettist Marc Bamuthi, called “brea(d)th.” The Chicago Symphony Orchestra shared sobering statistics on representation of Black and Latino musicians in orchestras.
Radio 3's "20th Century Radicals" wrangles with recent history • VAN Magazine
Beginning with Stockhausen on April 6, “20th Century Radicals” is a new 40-part series about the composers who shaped the previous century. Over the course of 40 weekly episodes, it covers Andriessen and Berio through to Xenakis and La Monte Young, via El-Dabh, Jolas, Murail and Takahashi, and many more. It’s the sort of series I really hope becomes appointment radio.
Why hasn't the Musicians' Union been on strike since 1980? • VAN Magazine
The UK-based Musicians’ Union has 36,000 members, and covers musicians across a huge variety of genres, vocations and working patterns. Its orchestral section—about 10% of the membership—represents the best organized part of the union.
Ben Nobuto: inside the mind of a modern composer
It’s hard to imagine where Ben Nobuto’s music would be without the internet. Since his breakthrough in 2021 with the Manchester Collective commission SERENITY 2.0, Ben has continued to develop a noticeably individual voice in contemporary classical music through his consistently curious engagement with both the internet and online culture. The most striking aspect of his music is its pace.
Bastard Assignments on family, Englishness, and the domestic • VAN Magazine
It’s been a decade since Jennifer Walshe described “The New Discipline” in a program text for Borealis Festival. This was not a school or a style, but a way of working that she saw shared across music she was witnessing, “where the physical, theatrical and visual aspects are as important as the sonic.” The text is a one-two combo: it says, Yes, this is happening, then asks, how can we make it better?
A London orchestra played music for 100 years. Then it vanished
A tale of angry musicians, unpaid bills and a mystery about what really went wrong On the afternoon of 7 February 2024, the renowned London Chamber Orchestra was rehearsing for a concert set to take place the following evening, featuring music by Mozart as well as a new French horn concerto by a fast-rising British composer. The mood in the room was testy.
Heart of Glass
In “Maria,” a sad, nosy, seedy film in which Maria Callas dies once again, banalities appear dressed as aphorisms. “Happiness never produced a beautiful melody,” she tells Mandrax, her journalist-cum-hallucinogen. When her obliging footman Ferruccio asks what she has taken—the film obsesses about Callas’s pills—she floats back a response: “I took liberties all my life.
ENO Confirms This Season's Designs Use “AI-Enhanced” Artwork
There’s something rather odd about ENO’s current season, and it’s not that it’s excessively short. As VAN has reported on previously, and others have recently noted online, there’s the strong whiff of unattributed AI involved in their work. First, it was in their website copy, which, for a time, claimed that Benjamin Britten was still alive, and that Richard and Johann Strauss were related. Now, it’s in their design department. To read VAN, register for free or purchase a subscription.
Struggler
Alongside the regular recital appearances and branching out into conducting, in the six months between December just passed and May this year, the baritone Benjamin Appl will have released three albums: one, out in February, of Kurtág songs intermingled with Schubert lieder, featuring a rare appearance of the composer at the piano for Schubert’s “Der Jüngling An Der Quille” and Brahms’s “Sonntag”; a second, a journey in song through the life and times of his mentor and teacher, Dieter...
Indeterminate Acts
In 1959, the Smithsonian Folkways label released an album called “Indeterminacy,” a piece that features John Cage speaking, and David Tudor playing mashed-up material from the former’s “Fontana Mix” and “Concert for Piano and Orchestra.” Since comedian Stewart Lee and pianists Tania Caroline Chen and Steve Beresford first decided to perform “Indeterminacy” around 15 years ago, it’s become something like a repertory work for this occasional trio, who come together only in the performance of...
Alexandre Kantorow Rises, With Piano Prizes and the Paris Olympics Original
On the cover of his latest album, Alexandre Kantorow 's left arm falls back behind a piano bench. A wave builds slowly from his dangled palm, up through the straight line of his bare forearm, and crests around his shoulders before breaking, down through his arched neck and deeply bowed head, leaving, in the wash, his right hand at the keys.
A Fast-Rising Star Reveals His Humble Origins
Tall, thin as a rake, with wispy hair and piercing blue eyes, Kurt Dirigent looks more like an imaginary character than the artistic director of the ground-breaking ensemble Lorem Ipsum. He orders a flat white at the Soho branch of London-based independent coffee shop Gail’s, with the pained look of a man who has seen it all. But as the sunlight shines on his white face, I’m reminded that, past the good looks and affable charm, this is a man who means serious business.
The London Contemporary Music Festival Trolls for Aesthetics
Recently, the London Contemporary Music Festival released a limited run of merchandise. There was a graphic T-shirt featuring the names of musicians whose creations have appeared at past festivals, plotted on a graph with two axes the Y labeled "twee" to "brutal," and the X "top" to "bottom." Brian Ferneyhough was a brutal top, Cornelius Cardew a twee bottom, and Laurie Anderson was somewhere in between.
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