Tempo rubato (literally “stolen time” in Italian) is perhaps most closely associated with the music of Fryderyk Chopin, his friend and fellow composer Franz Liszt, and other composers of the Romantic period. But it is possible to achieve rubato effectively

English composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934) first went to Scandinavia as a young man working for his father. He went first to Sweden and then, in his off hours, went to Norway and began a lifelong fascination with the country, its

In 1827, Hector Berlioz went to a play and came away transformed. At the Odéon Theatre in Paris, a performance of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet took his heart. Everything about the play and the performance affected him – the raging

Hong Kong-born and now based in London, pianist Annie Yim is the creator of MusicArt London, a conceptual concert series which combines music with poetry and visual arts, creating interesting and unexpected dialogues and connections between the works in the

Camille Saint-Saëns was not a deeply religious man, and he certainly had “a repugnance for religious ceremonies.” On one occasion he even made arrangements for someone else to represent him at a baptism service where he was to become a

Bela Bartók once famously said, “Competitions are for horses, not artists.” Bartók’s quip draws attention to the fact that judging music competitions in artistic performance and composition are fundamentally, and unavoidably an inexact science. Judged by experts with different tastes,

Today we seem to spend far too much of our daily lives trying to do things at high speed or in a hurry, without allowing ourselves time to stand still and think, or to look up occasionally to admire a