‘I Follow What Feels Exciting’ The work of boundary-pushing cellist, composer, songwriter, vocalist and performer Laura Moody is hard to define, such is the variety and diversity of her musical life. As a cellist she has performed with Björk, the

“I am in a prison: One wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past, and I want to escape” 100 years ago, on 28 May 1923, the Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) was born in the little Transylvanian town

Modest Mussorgsky’s walk about a picture show, Pictures at an Exhibition, started life as a piano suite in 10 parts with a recurring Promenade part as the viewer moved from picture to picture. Written in 1874, it is based on

Recently, the “Centre de musique romantique française” at the Venetian Palazzetto Bru Zane has released an impressive anthology of 165 compositions by French Romantic women composers. In essence, they have resurrected the memory of nineteenth-century French women composers that had

Niccolò Paganini had never been a picture of perfect health. His physical appearance—tall and thin with long arms, legs, fingers, and toes, and exceptional flexibility of his joints—recently gave rise to suggestions that he suffered from “Marfan Syndrome.” Although no

Johann Sebastian Bach is, of course, one of the most beloved composers of all time. He’s also famous for having fathered twenty children. A few became famous composers in their own right…but many of them died tragically young, too. Today

I am sure I have told you that I am an absolute fan of gothic and horror novels and films. From “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” to “Alien” to “Prey for the Devil” and “M3GAN,” I just love them all.

Belgian violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe (1858–1931) wrote his six violin sonatas, Op. 27, after hearing a performance of J.S. Bach’s six violin sonatas. One writer noted ‘these sketches, almost improvisations, emerged as six intimate portraits in music of his friends