At the risk of stating the incredibly obvious, the violin is hard to play. Some players find that, in order to master a specific skill, it’s useful to strip it from a wider musical context and focus on the specific

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) penned a vast number of letters, starting from about the age of 14 and ranging to the last month of his life. Literally, thousands of these documents have been preserved, thanks to the foresight of his

Yuja Wang is indisputably one of the world’s best pianists. Her musicianship pairs an ironclad technique with a searing passion. Her fashion sense is famous, too. Nobody on the concert platform today rocks stiletto heels like Yuja Wang! We checked

Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) spent three years in America and gave us some great works written during that time that were highly influential. His use of native American and black song sources opened the eyes of many American composers to the

Cosí fan tutte is the least performed of the Mozart–Da Ponte operas. The comedy of Le Nozze di Figaro and the travails of our favourite libertine in Don Giovanni were much more popular. The uncertain and changing morals of Cosí

On 20 June 2023, Christophe Rousset and “Les Talens Lyriques” premiered the recently rediscovered opera Fausto by Louise-Angélique Bertin (1805-1877). That exceptional setting by a recognized female composer and friend of Hector Berlioz had been lost except for a piano

Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), unlike his contemporaries, really only started to be a composer in mid-life, so his work emerged, fully formed and of ‘startling originality’, later in his life than for most. His reputation up to around 1916 was really

Starting with a hoot of a boat whistle, we’re off on an adventure. For our heroine, the boat trip is one with destination disaster but for us, we get a treat in Kurt Weill’s music for the musical Marie Galante.