Ever since I was a little girl, my parents made me watch the New Year’s concert of the Vienna Philharmonic. Apparently, as they kept telling me, “it is good for you.” They needn’t have worried, because I loved to watch

Cellists over the world relish playing the works of Johannes Brahms. The chamber music—his string quartets, piano trios, piano quartets, piano quintet, and the two string sextets are lush and rewarding to play. Brahms intended to perform the piano parts

As we say goodbye to 2022 and hello to 2023, we embark once more on a journey into the unknown. We might have gained the upper hand in the seemingly never-ending struggle against Covid-19, but new flu variants are once

Here are my picks to remember 2022 in music. Nixon in China according to TANG Jianping How about a different narrative of Nixon in China, probably from a Chinese perspective? Beijing-based composer TANG Jianping’s opera Premier ZHOU (2019) got its

It was almost a miracle that Pablo Casals survived his childhood. He was born on 29 December 1876 in Vendrell, a town near Barcelona, with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. Fortunately, “the village midwife was skilled enough to

Born on 28 December 1967 in the town of Brighton, England, Nigel Kennedy is pejoratively known by his detractors as the “Liberace of the Nineties.” He wasn’t at all interested in the prevailing image of the straight-laced musician in a

Once you get away from the maudlin 19th-century songs such as Auld Lang Syne, that sing farewell to the old year, there’s a world of other traditions for the new year. Many involve street or home parties, fireworks, special foods,

For Maestro Xu Zhong, 2022 has been an incredibly busy and fruitful year. With the Covid-19 pandemic still paralyzing much of the world, Xu has launched a number of initiatives to assure that music and the arts have not been