A little-known chapter of the Second World War is the subject of the recently premiered and stunning new work Émigré. It’s an oratorio about the thousands of Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany seeking a haven in Shanghai in the

I know a lot of people who are almost afraid of the symphonies by Johannes Brahms. Everybody keeps telling them how wonderful and how great these pieces are, but it can be a little difficult to connect with them. Brahms

Some of opera’s biggest box-office champions began life as spectacular misfires. From Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (heckled by a claque in 1786) to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (booed off the La Scala stage in 1904), opera performances have been ruined

As a young girl, I just couldn’t stop reading the fabulous fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875). The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, The Snow Queen, and The Princess and the Pea feature 3-dimensional characters who offer timeless lessons

Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–1983) was one of the most daring and innovative British composers of the twentieth century. The daughter of famed architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, she defied both her family’s expectations and the male-dominated classical music world to carve out

The Swedish violinist Daniel Lozakovich, born on 1 April 2001 in Stockholm, made his concert debut at age nine under Vladimir Spivakov in Moscow. The son of a Belarusian father and a Kyrgyz mother, he started playing the violin at

The Central Library of the Masovian Voivodeship, one of the largest public libraries in Poland, has just announced a sensational music find! This library was burned to the ground in January 1945 by retreating Nazi German soldiers, and roughly 300,000

Happy Birthday to Johann Sebastian Bach, again! As we discovered last time, Bach’s birthday falls on either 21 March according to the Julian calendar, or 31 March if you prefer the Gregorian calendar. Bach probably celebrated his birthday on 21