In our celebrity-obsessed, ‘image is everything’ times, it seems that the fledgling concert pianist’s path to the modern concert arena – the ‘Three C’s’ of Conservatoire, Competition and Concerto – has turned professional piano playing into a kind of Olympian

Some of the greatest gems of music are written for small ensemble. But in chamber music you don’t have a conductor to tell you what to do, nor are you entirely on your own to make musical decisions. How does

This is the Italian composer Giovanni Sollima playing one of his creations. What is it about music that moves us so? Where else can you see a person react to anything like this, except through music? Look at how this

There’s a special poignancy to Schumann’s Geistervariationen (“Ghost Variations”). Dedicated to his beloved wife Clara, they were written just a few weeks before he was committed to a lunatic asylum at Endenich, and were the last piece of music he

It was on a day in April—it was actually the 17th of April—when someone told me that Jörg Demus had passed away. In the Internet era, news spreads like wildfire. But the source of all this commotion came from Wikipedia,

Anton Arensky (1861-1906) could not be considered a musical rebel by any stretch of the imagination. Perceived to lack a distinctive personal style, Rimsky-Korsakov famously said, “in his youth Arensky did not escape some influence from me; later the influence

The French pastillist Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704-1788) is known for his portraits of the most famous men and women of his time, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. He also captured some of the most