CENTRAL ENGLAND: Mike Wheeler's concert reviews from Nottingham and Derbyshire feature high profile artists on the UK circuit - often quite early on their tours.
VIDEO PODCAST: Slava Ukraini! - recorded on 24 February 2022, the day the world woke up to the news that Vladimir Putin's Russian forces had invaded Ukraine. A fifty minute video which also features Caitríona O'Leary and Eric Fraad discussing their new film Island of Saints, and pays tribute to Joseph Horovitz, Malcolm Troup and Maria Nockin.
Russian tenor Aleksei Maslennikov was born in Novocherkassk on 9 September 1929. After studies at the Moscow Conservatory he sang at the Bolshoi Theatre from 1955 until the late 1990s. Roles included the title roles in Massenet's Werther and Gounod's Faust, Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly, Alfredo in La Traviata, Rodolfo in La bohème, Mozart in Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri, Vaudemont in Tchaikovsky's Iolanta and Don Giovanni in The Stone Guest.
Aleksei Maslennikov died on 30 November 2016, aged eighty-seven.