Piano playing shouldn’t be a competitive activity, yet players are regularly pitted against one another in international music competitions. Alongside this is an ongoing argument about what are the hardest pieces in the pianist’s repertoire.

The key point raised in part-one of this article for musicians wanting to make it in the music worlds is to never give up. Many other salient points can be added to your list of requirements to maintain a lifelong

“amazing skill, personality and vigor” – Harold C Schonberg Percy Grainger (1882-1961), Australian pianist, composer and noted eccentric, is most famous for ‘Country Gardens’, his transcription of an English folksong, with its frolicking rustic lilt. But Grainger was much more

Eleven days (June 17th to 27th) of complete immersion in the 2019 International Tchaikovsky Competition, enduring palm-sweating, heart-racing, and adrenalin-pumping conditions, while witnessing an array of ultra demanding repertoire mastered by especially fine musicians all day – that is my

We associate ragtime music with performers and composers such as Scott Joplin, confined by their poverty and marginality to the US. What we may not realize is how international this turn of the 20th century-style was and how influential it

In a sense, the thing furthest away from Classical music is pop music. But, in another sense, the two kinds of music are far closer than you think!

The French neo-classical painter Jean-Auguste-Domique Ingres (1780-1867) was very much a student of the academic painter Jacques-Louis David and brought David’s classical and restrained model into the nineteenth century. In addition to his considerable painting skills, he was also a