46 h. ago The best classical recordings of 2025: Ken Walton picks his highlights

Scotsman critic Ken Walton names his top five classical albums of the year

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7 d. ago From shiveringly vivid Mahler to the eclectic Hermes Experiment: our top classical recordings of 2025

Opera may be conspicuous by its absence, but the brilliance of Berlin Philharmonic’s Schoenberg and the exceptional South Korean Yunchan Lim gave us plenty to sink our teeth into this year The survey of the new releases that my colleagues and I have enjoyed most in 2025 differs in one significant respect from the lists of previous years. This year’s top ten contains no operas. There has been a profound change in record companies’ policies of how and what they record. The glitzy, studio-based opera recordings of the last century now seem impossible to contemplate, and even releasing audio-only recordings taken directly from live opera-house performances often seems less viable than issuing DVDs of the same productions.Some specialist labels devoted to specific areas of the operatic repertoire continue sterling work: operas feature prominently in Bru Zane’s mission on behalf of neglected French composers, while Opera Rara continues to crusade for forgotten, mostly 19th century, mostly...

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7 d. ago The Rolling Stones give blessing to Fatboy Slim’s Satisfaction sample after 25 years

The mashup Satisfaction Skank was unofficial for years but band allow Norman Cook to remake it using original stems of their 1965 hitA classic bootleg recording by Fatboy Slim which samples the Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction has finally been released, as the band give it their blessing after 25 years.Satisfaction Skank was a familiar track on turn-of-the-century dancefloors, as Fatboy Slim mashed up his own 1999 hit The Rockafeller Skank with the Stones’ 1965 classic, hurling Keith Richards’ iconic guitar riff into the “big beat” sound of the late 90s. Continue reading...

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2 w. ago Radiohead Breaks Metallica's Attendance Record at London's O2

Radiohead Breaks Metallica's Attendance Record at London's O2  Ultimate Classic Rock

Politics

3 w. ago Agatha Christie classic coming to Manchester Opera House for 75th anniversary

The record-breaking classic embarks on its 75th Anniversary Tour across the UK and Ireland

Politics

4 w. ago Ken Burns on his American Revolution documentary: ‘We won’t work on a more important film’

The acclaimed documentarian’s latest epic series has been in the works for a decade and features A-list contributions from Meryl Streep to Tom HanksKen Burns is no longer a mere documentarian; he is a brand, a franchise, a one-man industrial complex. When he has a new project heading for the small screen, everybody wants a part of him.Burns has done “more fucking podcasts than I ever thought possible”, he says, nearing the end of nine-month promotional tour that included 40 cities, 80 screenings and hundreds of interviews. “I think there are 340.1m podcasts, one for every American, and I’ve done half of them.” Continue reading...

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