In his farewell production after a six year tenure as Director of Opera at Covent Garden, Kasper Holten managed a veritable hat trick. He turned Wagner’s notoriously overlong opera (at nearly five hours it is possibly the longest single opera)

After we’ve gotten Faust sorted with his devil problems, all sorts of other operas have them as well. In Dvořák’s opera Čert a Káča (Kate and the Devil), we open at a village dance. Jirka has to return to work

Mélancolie! From LE FLEM, P.: Piano Works (2016) Released by Grand Piano Le Flem: Mélancolie!Paul Le Flem belonged to the Parisian circle of Martinů, Tcherepnin and Tansman, summing up his own music as a fusion of three influences: his native

The composer Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) was active in many different aspects of French musical life: he was a singer and a director, a conductor and a critic, and last, but not least, a composer and an artist. He entered the

The concert is complete, the applause is given generously. The performer bows, acknowledging the audience and their applause, and leaves the stage. The applause grows more enthusiastic and the performer returns once again to take a bow and thank the

Like many young and talented Nordic musicians, Thomas Dyke Acland Tellefsen (1823-1874) was drawn to the city of Paris. Born in Trondheim, Norway, Tellefsen moved to Paris in 1842 and studied piano with Scandinavian pianist Charlotte Thygeson, who was one

It all happened during the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign in World War I. With death and destruction all around, an Australian soldier sat in a trench and composed a violin sonata for a young woman far away. “He had a tiny

When Ravel wrote his piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin in memory of the soldiers of the Great War, the first performance in Paris in 1919 was given by the Marguerite Long, who was the widow of Joseph de Marliave,