When the legendary Brazilian musician João Gilberto (1931-2019) released his first record, Chega de Saudade, nobody could foresee that it would become one of the most influential events in modern Brazilian music. Gilberto had created a unique romantic and reflective

In the mid-1980s one of my music teachers was the composer and recorder player Ian Shanahan. I once asked him why he loved and played the recorder? His reply still rings true today. “No one ever told me that the

She took piano lessons with Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, studied composition with Anton Reicha, a friend of Beethoven’s, and renowned violinist Joseph Joachim performed in the premiere of her nonet for wind and strings. During her lifetime, Louise

Finals with Zlatomir Fung The Tchaikovsky Competition, the Olympics of music held every four years, is arguably the most important competition for young musicians between the ages of 16 and 32. The major monetary prizes are but a small part.

Vibrato can make you feel more than what is intended. String instruments pronounce it, woodwinds make it felt, brass, well maybe it only slightly works for them, but the human voice excels with applied vibrato. Select and functional vibrato can

Iván Erőd was born the son of a businessman in Budapest in 1936 amidst the brewing catastrophe of World War II. In fact, his brother and his grandparents were murdered in Buchenwald and Auschwitz in 1944, and his parents barely

Museums aren’t always interesting or exciting places to visit. Some are boring, some are too informative, some simply don’t appeal to us. Stepping into the Pianola Museum in Amsterdam with an exceptionally ordinary entrance, I didn’t expect much, but it

“amazing skill, personality and vigor” – Harold C Schonberg Percy Grainger (1882-1961), Australian pianist, composer and noted eccentric, is most famous for ‘Country Gardens’, his transcription of an English folksong, with its frolicking rustic lilt. But Grainger was much more