What an extraordinary year! Some of the well guarded secrets that have long been circulating in the shadow of the operatic spotlight as sheer “rumours” before, were revealed for the first time to the general public. It followed a Me

The composer and educator Dmitry Kabalevsky wrote, “We should never for an instant forget our main purpose, which is to interest our audience in music, to emotionally fascinate them, to infect them with our love of music.” The composer’s interest

The 1970s brought us musicals based on contemporary society (Company), memories of the past (Follies, Gigi, Evita, Sweeney Todd, Cats), stories based on the Bible (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat) and stories from French novels of a century earlier

Over a period of 20 years, Johannes Brahms cautiously approached composition via different genres, carefully isolating the required musical elements. He experimented with orchestral colors in his Serenades, blended symphonic sketches with a sonata for two pianos to produce his

We spoke recently with Florentine luthier Lapo Vettori, a third-generation string instrument maker. The Vettori family began instrument making in 1935 and continues today, making violins, violas (Lapo’s specialty) and violoncellos. Over the past 80-some years, the family has made

The life of the pianist is, by necessity, solitary. For many of us, the solitude is not an issue: we crave a sense of apartness to enable us to do our work and to create special connections with audiences when

The American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder penned his play The Long Christmas Dinner in 1931. This one-act drama focuses on the life of the Bayard family, somewhere in the American West. At the center of the play is a

The Two Fiddlers: Dances (version for violin and piano) From MAXWELL DAVIES, P.: Sonata for Violin Alone / The Two Fiddlers: Dances / Violin Sonata / A Voyage to Fair Isle (2017) Released by Naxos Maxwell Davies: The Two Fiddlers: