For years I told myself I couldn’t play Liszt – or Rachmaninoff for that matter – because of the relatively small size of my hands. I can stretch a ninth, just about. Any more and it’s painful – and a

Here is the trivia question for today. Can you name the Puccini opera that the composer himself desperately wanted to forget? The answer is Edgar, and despite revising it repeatedly, Puccini eventually declared the work irredeemable. Edgar was Puccini’s second

Born in 1897 in Milan, the Italian cellist Enrico Mainardi had a small cello in his hands at the age of three. He astonished everyone by performing one of the Beethoven Cello Sonatas flawlessly just a few years later. Hailed

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) loved children. Although he was not married and did not have children of his own, he always seemed to spend more time with children than with adults. In fact, he never outgrew his ability to see the

The idea of a trio is simple. Three people, three performers, and so on. But the musical trio is something special. We’ll start with the piano trio. At first piano trios were groups that got together and then just as

When Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto premiered at the Palau de la Música Catalana, in Barcelona on 19 April 1936, the composer was no longer alive. Shortly after he had finished the composition he was stung by an insect at the

I don’t know if you agree, but The Exorcist (1973) and The Shining (1980) are two of the most iconic horror movies ever to flicker across the silver screen. These are all about scary imagery, ranging from a twisting and

There was great confusion at the premiere of Handel’s “Serse” at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket on 15 April 1738! I know you are asking yourself why that might have been the case? After all, Handel was setting the London stages