Picture this: A touring orchestra in Travel Hell: one-hundred musicians, a team of staff, a cargo plane full of instruments, sheet music and equipment, unexpectedly brought to a halt. The performance, scheduled years in advance, in a famous concert hall,

With the maturation of recording and streaming technologies, it is now possible to listen to the best of classical music in the comfort of our own places. This tremendous change, from having to dress up decently for “physical” concerts to

The 1970s were not short of operatic talent. The Met and Covent Garden regularly boasted extraordinary singers such as Luciano Pavarotti, Carlo Bergonzi, Renata Scotto; even Birgit Nilsson was still active. But then Spain exported a string of singers of

When I was preparing for my performance Diplomas – and indeed whenever I start working on new music – I put together a ‘scrapbook’ of music and other materials (articles, interviews, pictures etc), in effect for reference to help with

On 6 September 2018, we sadly lost another pioneer of the early music movement. Claudio Scimone, a student of Dimitri Mitropoulos and Franco Ferrara, was primarily known as the founder of the string ensemble “I Solisti Veneti.” Together with Neville

A shiny black Schimmel grand piano is stretched across the corner of a classroom normally reserved for French lessons. A small group of people sit in a semi-circle around the piano, some with musical scores opened on their laps, others

Picture this :- Eighteen days and nights of glorious music offered by a parade of world-class artists, talented Academy musicians and three Verbier Festival orchestras under the direction of renowned conductors; multiple masterclasses from 9:30am every day, held all day

The name ‘Im Klang’ says it all. The audience is seated ‘in the middle of the sound’. The players of the Wiener Symphoniker take leave of their traditional places on the concert platform and spread themselves widely throughout the empty