Marked by its technical bravura, Widmung (or Dedication in English) has remained one of the most popular encore pieces in piano recital, allowing pianists to display their virtuosity. However, Widmung is much more than a mere showpiece – containing probably

A musician’s pre-concert anxieties often show up in our worst nightmares—you are on stage and have no idea what piece you are playing, or you show up for the concert and you are the piano soloist (you don’t play the

I never intended to be a piano teacher. I worked for ten years in art and academic publishing after leaving university and I continued to freelance in this sector when I stopped full-time work to have my son. But as

The piano and violin duo Aleksey Igudesman and Hyung-ki Joo have given any number of audience members a new way to hear music that could, perhaps, be too familiar.

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