There’s a lot more to making music with children than singing The Wheels on the Bus or dancing to Baby Shark. Newborn babies can detect the pulse in music and infants respond to maternal speech and singing. Many children have

It was perhaps inevitable that pianist and writer Susan Tomes would turn her attention eventually to the extraordinarily broad repertoire of the piano – her instrument, and mine, and that of countless others, both professional and amateur players. While her

The idea of Tanztheater (dance theatre) came out of Germany in the 1920s. It started as ‘expressionist dance’ and was reborn in the 1980s in the work of German choreographers such as Pina Bausch and Reinhild Hoffmann. The influences of

The glossy cover of this book features a blown-up photograph of an unassuming gentleman with a deep penetrating gaze. It is quite reasonable to surmise that the subject is an intelligent, astute and empathetic individual, exuding an air of contemplative

For many around the world, choral music and Christmas go hand in hand, the sounds of choirs reverberating around magnificent churches where audiences flock to soak up the festive spirit. What, then, to do if pandemic restrictions put a halt

Philip Morahan is a British concert pianist. A once-great pianist, lauded by critics and adored by audiences, at 52 he can no longer play the piano. Marooned by performance anxiety, it seems that the sacrifices he has made in the

This is the fifth book by acclaimed Scottish pianist Susan Tomes, and unlike her previous books whose primary focus is on the exigencies of life as a professional musician – from ensemble playing and touring, coughers in the audience to

Humphrey Burton made his first connection with Leonard Bernstein when Bernstein came over to London for the premiere of Candide. It had opened to disappointing reviews in New York three years earlier and the only part of the work that