In the first collection of the music of the American composer Lee Kesselman, Were that Loving Were Enough, Haven (voice, clarinet, piano trio) showcases his music from 1920s pop to Japanese-influenced haiku settings. Kesselman’s musical and literary influences extend from

Not all composers are lost with their manuscripts. Some composers are simply lost to the accretions of time: if they were active when many other composers were active, they might just be buried under the weight of the ages. For

This year, 2024, is the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of Italian composer Giacomo Puccini in November of 1924. Known for his brilliant and spectacularly admired operas, he was virtually the Taylor Swift of his era. My husband and I

American pianist James Iman continues to release ground-breaking albums which challenge convention (his previous recording with music by Debussy is a case in point) and which present lesser-known or rarely-performed repertoire written since 1900 and specifically post-1945. He’s one of

When you think of an album organised around the idea of water, the usual suspects come to mind: Debussy and the sea, Ravel and the play of water, but when you start to look beyond that, water has some other

Camille Saint-Saëns’ (1835–1921) long life permitted him to be, as one writer said, ‘both a friend to Berlioz and an enemy of Les Six’. The same writer, Edward Sackville-West also said that Saint-Saëns was ‘an exceedingly clever and cultivated man.

The ensemble Z.R.I. take their name from Zum Roten Igel, or ‘To the Red Hedgehog’, the tavern in 19th century Vienna where Schubert and Brahms went to hear Gypsy and folk music. From their radical re-scoring of the Brahms Clarinet

“Learning about Beethoven is a joyful journey without end” British journalist and newscaster John Suchet has had a lifelong fascination with Ludwig van Beethoven, from the moment he discovered the great German composer’s music in his twenties. Beethoven’s music, in