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The Best Bits
15th May 2026
Hello friends,
Welcome to our newsletter, where our top video recommendation is the world premiere of Iain Bell's new opera, Medusa, streamed live from La Monnaie, Brussels. It's a good week for contemporary opera with ENO's first staging designed for Manchester, Du Yun's Angel's Bone opening on Tuesday. Read Lawrence Dunn's review.
Enjoy our little feature on World Bee Day! 🐝
Mark, Elisabeth and Jo
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Grafenegg
This summer, Grafenegg Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary with a feast of top international artists and orchestras. The festival also pays tribute to the founding artistic director Rudolf Buchbinder by naming a new chamber music hall in the renovated Riding School after him: the Rudolf Buchbinder Saal.
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Book for the BBC Proms!
Tickets to the BBC Proms go on sale tomorrow morning – 86 concerts including eight weeks at the Royal Albert Hall, plus weekend residencies at The Glasshouse in Gateshead and Bristol. Our tip: complete your Proms planner by midnight to make the booking process smoother!
The Bachtrack Insiders
Personal picks from our site
Mark Pullinger Editor
Mahler 8
Veni creator spiritus! Last Sunday morning, I had the pleasure of hearing Mahler 8 at the Wiener Konzerthaus, conducted by Andris Nelsons. To get your Mahler 8 fix from the same venue, do check out this recording from 1975 with the one and only Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and associated choirs and soloists.
Elisabeth Schwarz Editor
Giuseppe Verdi's Stiffelio
Mark and I have a shared home office week in Vienna and we are two operas down – Salome at the Wiener Staatsoper and Stiffelio at MusikTheater an der Wien. As luck would have it, we have a stream on Bachtrack that combines the best of both. A Stiffelio from the Teatro di Piacenza with Lidia Fridman – who sang a mesmerising Salome last Sunday! – singing Lina.
Jo Johnson Head of Marketing
Clara Schumann
The extraordinary life of Clara Schumann, who died 130 years ago on 20th May 1896, is much documented but worth reiterating: child prodigy, recitalist, composer, educator, editor, mother of eight children, dedicated wife to Robert Schumann, recital partner of Joseph Joachim and muse to Johannes Brahms. Having outlived Robert by 40 years, she dedicated her remaining years to championing his work and continuing her own impressive 60-year performing career while balancing responsibility for her large family (including several grandchildren after the early deaths of two of her adult children) – a feat that many would struggle with today, let alone set against the challenges of being a working woman in the 19th century. Despite her international status whilst alive, it took over 100 years for her music to be appreciated after her death. I really enjoyed this article about composers' handwriting, which contains a small glimpse into her early abilities.
What's hot? 🔥
English National Opera: Angel's Bone
For ENO's first production specifically tailored for Manchester, Kip Williams stages Du Yun and Royce Vavrek's multifaceted Angel's Bone, with performances of great emotional directness broadcast live on camera.
Out and about
Our tips on what to see live in the UK this week
Sheffield Chamber Music Festival
Crucible Theatre, Sheffield
15th-23rd May
The week-long Sheffield Chamber Music Series, guest curated by soprano Claire Booth, focuses on storytelling, literature and theatricality in music, exploring everything from Nordic sagas and Kafka to Beckett, Brontë poetry and children's stories.
Nicola Benedetti plays Elgar
Usher Hall, Edinburgh/Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow
15th & 16th May
Benedetti joins the RSNO for Elgar's Violin Concerto, the big, passionate heart of a concert that begins with musical fairy tales from Azerbaijan and ends amid the dark magic and glittering romance of Stravinsky's Firebird.
Warsaw Philharmonic
Cadogan Hall, London
19th May
Krzysztof Urbański conducts a lost masterpiece by the postwar Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, Chopin's Second Piano Concerto with pianist Alexandra Dariescu and some of the greatest tunes even Tchaikovsky ever composed.
Tosca
Glyndebourne Opera House, East Sussex
Opens 21st May
Assemble your picnics! The Glyndebourne Festival 2026 is here. Ted Huffman's new production of Puccini's tragic thriller kicks off the proceedings, with Caitlin Gotimer in the title role. Be quick: only limited seats remain!
Live to your living room
The best streamed content to watch this week
Medusa
La Monnaie | De Munt
Watch the world premiere of Iain Bell's latest opera. He and director and librettist Lydia Steier explore the human dimension of the myth of Medusa.
Live 15th May
Helsinki
Joana Carneiro conducts a Faustian programme including Berlioz and Boulanger with the Finnish RSO
Live 15th May
Paris
The Quatuor Diotima is joined by Victor Julien-Laferrière for Schubert's divine String Quintet
Available now
Bayreuth
Regula Mühlemann sings Handel and Mozart in Bayreuth's beautiful Margravial Opera House
Live 15th May
One of the best...
...bee hosts in London! 🐝
World Bee Day
To mark World Bee Day on 20th May – which aims to raise global awareness of the crucial role bees and other pollinators play in ecosystems – you might have expected us to link to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee (OK, we did anyway!) but instead, we bring you this photo of our resident bee host Alison, one half of Bachtrack's founders and directors.
Alison and David's hives in their north London garden are playing their part in reversing the decline in pollinating insects and keeping the planet healthy – their wildflower garden is a key part of this – while also keeping us Bachtracklers supplied with delicious honey at our biannual company meetings. Not to mention the entertaining stories of trying to relieve neighbours of swarms of bees when part of the colony decides to set out on their own... 🫣
Meanwhile, if you fancy a live performance of Flight of the Bumblebee, click the button below. We're particularly intrigued by the a cappella version by Kings Return at the Concertgebouw Recital Hall in Amsterdam in August...
In the news
This week's stories
Riddle Me This...
What have we hidden in the anagram below?
Critics' Corner
What our reviewers watched
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Photography credits:
Angel's Bone © Tristram Kenton;
Medusa © Simon Van Rompay, Joana Carneiro © Vasco Vilhena, Quatuor Diotima © Michel Nguyen, Regula Mühlemann © Shirley Suarez;
Alison Karlin © David Karlin;
Aerial view from Amsterdam Avenue looking east © Rendering by Brooklyn Digital Foundry, Giedrė Šlekytė © Simon Pauly
Teodor Currentzis and Utopia © Daniel Dittus, Sasha Cooke and Christian Pursell (Carmen) © Sunny Martini, Royal Danish Ballet in Akram Khan’s Lady Macbeth © Camilla Winther
