Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin can play anything just about better than anyone else on the current international piano circuit. Or so it would appear from his fascinating recitals whose diverse and ambitious programmes range from Alkan to Ives, Liszt to

After many decades of performing, one would think everything that could possibly go wrong has… Wrong! Or am I a magnet for snafus? Last month, my pianist and I drove the two hours to a University in a nearby town.

Long before the recent cultural revolution that wants us to slow down the pace of our lives known as the Slow Movement, we had the slow movement in music. Composers have always known that to balance their music, there needed

Does your music collection have a cross-section of classical and electronic music? If not, it should. Because classical and electronic music share many sonic similarities. The number of contemporary pop, rock, electronic, and alternate music groups and composers who have

Alfred Brendel is one of the reasons why I play the piano. My mother was a great fan of Brendel, and my love of Schubert’s piano music, especially the Impromptus and Moments Musicaux, is the direct result of my mother

French composer Erik Satie was a curious, eccentric man. He had a penchant for grey corduroy suits (he had seven identical ones) and umbrellas, and apparently only ate white food. His response to a critic who said his music lacked

Playing a musical instrument is an amazing endeavor. It’s thrilling when a performance is everything we want it to be and the audience erupts in applause. If we’ve conveyed the beauty, meaning, and emotion of the music, and not the

As far as living legends of music go, for me, Steve Reich is pretty up there. A pioneer of minimalism, this New Yorker’s hypnotically enthralling music has been captivating people since his early days in the 1960s, and he shows