‘You didn’t just wake up, did you?’ After many Facebook messages, negotiating times here and there to try and arrange a convenient time to talk, my phone finally buzzes unannounced on a Saturday morning, causing me to leap up and

In search of an identity for Classical music Marc Blitzstein: Piano Sonata The enormous political and cultural changes that flooded Europe in the first decade of the 20th century led to a dismantling of political, social and artistic structures. As

With already a Decca album under his belt at the age of 22, Martynas Levickis is a concert accordionist ready to take on the world and its assumptions of the accordion. Quickly skyping in between concerts at the world-famous Schleswig-Holstein

A Composer, Scholar and a Gentleman! Take for example Johann Mattheson (1681-1764), a prolific composer, singer, organist, writer, lexicographer, diplomat, and music theorist. Born in Hamburg as the third, and only surviving son of a local tax collector, Mattheson displayed

A Mandolin in Carnegie Hall? Surely not? But yes, it’s been done, in addition to Wigmore Hall and the Lincoln Center. Israeli-born Avi Avital is on a mission: to make the mandolin as at-home in the concert hall as the

Muse, Femme Fatale, Composer Her admirers described Alma Schindler as pathologically cruel, anti-Semitic, exceedingly vain, prone to excessive drinking, and utterly obsessed by a sense of entitlement that the world owed her something in return for her brilliance and beauty.

This month, our Artists of the Month are the Quatour Hermès, a young string quartet moving from strength to strength. I caught up quickly with Elise Liu, their second fiddle, ahead of their upcoming tour to China.

Murder in the Rue Careme-Prenant In the early morning of 23 October 1764, the violinist and composer Jean-Marie Leclair (1697-1764) was found lying dead in the vestibule of his house in a pool of blood from three vicious stab wounds