Are you ready for a bit of specialist musical trivia to impress your friends? Here it goes! What is the name of the instrument that you can see, you can hear but you can’t touch? Performing on this instrument has

You can’t tell the players without scorecard, as the old baseball metaphor goes, and in classical music, we use the program for the same purpose – who’s singing / playing / responsible for what. In UK theatres, you still buy

Although it has an older meaning, when we think of the “nocturne” we think of Frederic Chopin. He took his inspiration from the Irish composer John Field whose works were the first to take the title to the piano. A

The (Almost) Forgotten Piano Wizard! Between 1809 and 1814 six remarkable composers were born; Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Thalberg and Adolf von Henselt (1814-89). Surely you have heard of the first five, but what about Henselt? Make no mistake, during

The Shanghai Conservatory of Music is one of the most competitive musical education institutions in China. The Conservatory’s Vice President, Zhang Xiangping, and Zhou Xianglin, the director of teaching and study affairs, filled me in on how training at Shanghai

Paul Klee (1879-1940) craved the freedom to explore radical and modernist experimentations in his paintings. In music, however, he could never come to terms with contemporary works of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. In fact, he even disliked the compositions of