As December assumes its full hegemony and all the familiar thoughts of Christmas come swirling in, a highlight of my days has been an activity that feels like a kind of daily Christmas present to myself: learning the cello. I

In terms of piano music, Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann dominate Romanticism with grand narratives. These marvellous composers have long shaped both concert life and listening habits. Yet, there is an entire chorus of quieter figures that worked in the margins.

Why do some of the world’s greatest composers stop writing music long before their deaths? In the popular imagination, composers write until their dying breath. Everyone who has seen the movie Amadeus remembers the scene where Mozart is on his

For Japanese-English classical pianist and conductor Mitsuko Uchida, performing is not simply an aesthetic exercise but a moral discipline. Her interpretation is not an assertive personality but an ethical act, grounded in responsibility to the composer, fidelity to the score,

It seems to me that stand sharing is dead! Perhaps it started with the covid epidemic, but the advent and proliferation of iPad tablets is certainly contributing to going solo on a stand. My chamber music colleagues are using them

When William Christie was born on 19 December 1944 in Buffalo, New York, few could have predicted that he would become one of the most influential champions of French cultural heritage since the Enlightenment. Yet this soft-spoken American, armed with

The story of Édith Piaf (1915-1963) is one of those rare and tragic sagas that seem too extraordinary to be true. The tale of a small, frail girl who grew up in the gritty streets of Paris and ascended to

No country does winter like Russia, and no composer evokes Russia like Tchaikovsky. Today we’re looking at Tchaikovsky’s most wintry works. What makes a piece of classical music “wintry”, you might ask? Here’s a starting point: References in the title