Many modern orchestras are focusing on the audience experience today. In the United States and several other countries, you can go to a concert hall to hear a symphony orchestra and they will encourage you to clap between movements if

The miracle of an aristocratic performance lies in its capacity to vaporize everything that surrounds it…Mark Mitchell, ‘Virtuosi’ (Indiana University Press, 2000) Earlier this year I was privileged to hear two performers who are the living embodiment of superlatives like

If you don’t live in a museum and you love music, you may have heard of the music of Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen – born 1952. If you do live in Bach’s time and only ever expose your ears to

This is the Italian composer Giovanni Sollima playing one of his creations. What is it about music that moves us so? Where else can you see a person react to anything like this, except through music? Look at how this

‘From the outset all manner of unacceptable behaviour, whether manifesting itself emotionally in false rapture or facial grimace, the stamping of feet to mark the rhythm, accompanied by an all-embracing unsightly body movement, the shaking and nodding of the head

People are exquisitely attuned to sound from our very beginnings, through our mother’s soft cooing voice, which leads to language. Music has had a special place in the hearts and minds of virtually all cultures across time. The discovery of

Are you threatened by the music you like? We’ve seen it all too often, a composer or popular musician is found out to have a dark side. Does this change how much their music once meant to you? For most

I should have known better than to attempt the fast octaves at the beginning of Schubert‘s first Klavierstück, D946, with incorrect (or rather non-existent) technique (this was some years after I had returned to the piano seriously after an absence