It can come as quite a shock to encounter a professional musician outside of their natural home of the concert hall. Generally, our only contact with them, as audience members, may be a brief conversation in the green room after

(January 30, 1944 – April 28, 2020) The music world has lost one of the finest artists of our generation, cellist Lynn Harrell, a towering figure in more ways than one. At 6 feet 3 inches, (1.9 meters) and 250

The music from living Australian composers is fresh and alive with the sounds of this vast country and the inventive ideas of its many composers. The music and culture of the Aboriginal people from Australia is one of the oldest

Like the rest of the world, we felt deeply affected by the coronavirus crisis and when my youngest daughter started taping tissue paper as masks for her toys, I thought of doing a family project involving music, as a sort

We’re so familiar with the images of Beethoven in his mature years – the glower, the intense look, the solitary figure – but when we go back in time, we can see just how his contemporaries viewed him. The very

Peer pressure from dead people or following in the footsteps of greatness? Classical music is swathed in tradition and culturally conditioned thinking. The traditions of concert-going, for example, are well-known (don’t applaud between movements, listen in reverential silence), and show

Marin Alsop, perhaps one of the best-known women conductors, has broken through the glass ceiling decisively. She was the first woman to be appointed as music director of a major American orchestra in 2007, and has led the Baltimore Symphony

As a young cellist, one of the first things I learned was that a page of music waits, quietly. A musical score, says pianist Jeremy Denk, is “at once a book and a book waiting to be written.” The act