Western classical music has evolved in an intriguing way — almost cyclic in its nature, like many things in life. In its earliest forms, the composer was a complete musician: composer, performer, conductor, and often teacher all at once. Figures

As you make your way around the musical world, you start with the easy ones – a bit of Haydn, some Mozart, a venture into Beethoven. Then what? As your tastes mature and you desire something more, there’s Mahler. Each

The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) was one of the first women artists who changed the role of women in art. She illustrated concepts and ideas rarely explored by male artists to the foreground in her work, including chronic pain,

Wanda Aleksandra Landowska, born to Jewish parents in Warsaw on 5 July 1879, was the first person to record Bach‘s Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord in 1933. Her decision to revive harpsichord music was by no means uncontested. To celebrate

In the annals of operatic history, George Frideric Handel‘s Deidamia (1741) occupies a bittersweet position. As the composer’s forty-second and final opera, it marked the end of a momentous era for Italian opera in London. For centuries, it was often

Having arrived as the newly appointed Festival Manager, I sat at my desk in the King’s Lynn office, surrounded by the cobbled streets of this historic port town, considering the legacy I now help steward. King’s Lynn is steeped in

Stephen Foster, born on July 4th (1826–1864), was an American Romantic-era composer who, almost exclusively, wrote songs and even today, when we celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth, those songs live on. Stephen Collins Foster was born in Lawrenceville,

The compositions of the Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) draw on the melodic and rhythmic irregularities of folk music, particularly from Moravian and other Eastern European traditions, which he collected, edited, arranged, and used as the basis of his own