We generally don’t think of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) as a source for song texts but rather as the man for tales of the realism and drama of the Victorian English countryside. Yet, when the 20th century hit, nearly all Hardy

I never thought I’d write an article on “note bashing”. In general it’s not something I advocate – mindless repetitive practise, thoughtlessly hammering away at the same phrase or group of notes. However, during my work on one of Schubert’s

‘Be True to Yourself’ A Bartok concerto in Kiel and Hamburg, a Prokofiev concerto in Hong Kong, a Brahms concerto a week later in Tokyo… 30 year-old Valeriy Sokolov thinks nothing of having these giants of the repertoire at such

2016 has certainly seen more crises than most years. But while the attention of the general public and the media tends to move quickly from one disaster to the next, many of those crises remain far from resolved. One of

Pianist Egon Petri (1881-1962) was a Dutch citizen, born in Hannover, Germany, to Dutch parents. He first learned violin from his father, Henri Petri, who had been a student of Joseph Joachim, one of the most significant violinists of the

Charles-Marie Widor’s 10 organ symphonies, inspired by the magnificent Cavaillé-Coll organ at Saint-Sulpice in Paris revolutionized the art of organ playing and composition in France. However, the composer also left behind a substantial number of meticulously crafted compositions for a

The combination of music and imagery—as we have known since antiquity—is one of the most powerful psychological agents acting directly on human emotions. And ever since sound was first coupled with images at the turn of the 20th century, classical