“This album […] is a true delight and has much to savour.” Having recorded the last three piano concertos by Saint-Saëns with great acclaim, Alexandre Kantorow, the winner of the Tchaikovsky Competition in 2019, went on to record not only

“I find Roberts’ argument most persuasive” In the introduction to his new book, pianist Paul Roberts recounts a conversation with “an elderly and much celebrated piano teacher” when he was just starting out as the inspiration for a lifetime’s fascination

English composer William Busch (1901-1945) started his music career as a concert pianist, performing mostly in the UK, Europe, and the US, and then turned to composition. In 1915, he was sent to the US because of the war, and

Bad Wildbad is one of the least probable stations on the European summer festival circuit. Small, relatively nondescript and poorly accessible, the spa town in the Black Forest once welcomed Gioachino Rossini when he was seeking cures for his many

After his sparkling C P E Bach disc, released on the Hyperion label in January 2022, Marc-André Hamelin, that fearless master of the piano who seems to be able to play anything (and I mean anything!) moves seamlessly from the

The title of pianist Jeremy Denk‘s recently published memoir, will be familiar to anyone who had piano lessons as a child. It’s a mnemonic of the notes e, g, b, d and f which sit on the lines of the

Music lovers often wonder how a 19th century audience would experience an opera during its absolute first performance, without the benefit of extensive written plot summaries, YouTube videos and CDs to prepare for the music, or Wikipedia guides to pinpoint

When I had sufficiently advanced in my piano studies, my teacher introduced me to the “French Suites” by Johann Sebastian Bach. I was told that “Suites” generally consisted of a series of stylized dance movements, with the name of the