The dinosaur ate my homework. The dog ate my homework. The computer ate my homework. Through the ages teachers have heard extremely convincing excuses to not do their work. Dear music pupils: Don’t tell me you’ve practiced when you haven’t.

Amongst the wealth of operatic activity in the UK today (as surveyed recently on Interlude), the work of Streetwise Opera stands out as some of the most important. Founded in 2000, they have worked with London’s homeless on a number

Suite in A Major ‘American Suite’, Op. 98b, B. 190: IV. Andante From Dvorák – Symphony No. 6 / American Suite op. 98b (2014) Released by Harmonia Mundi Dvorák: Suite in A Major ‘American Suite’, Op. 98b, B. 190: IV.

We think nothing of it – a brilliant performance and we launch to our feet, applauding madly. In the years of the claque, however, spontaneous applause was not so easy to come by. The claque, a word coming out of

Playing an audition for Johannes Brahms, who single-handedly controlled much of Vienna’s musical establishment—must have been an unbelievably frightening experience. Just ask Hans Rott, who showed his symphony to the old master in 1880. Rott was told, “you have no

When I was a fledgling cellist in the Indianapolis Symphony I remember not thinking much about playing an outdoor concert—the program entailed “crowd pleasers.” When I arrived to the park I was told that the principal cellist’s car had died.

Producing a doctoral thesis in the humanities, especially when it involved archival research, used to be a lot of work. It frequently involved lengthy travel from library to library in order to research original materials related to the subject at

After Kandinsky’s and Schoenberg ground-breaking endeavors, many artists in France, Italy and Russia started to follow different paths — all towards abstraction.