Western music flourishes in Japan in the early twentieth century, mainly due to the influence of Hideo Saito, who performed and conducted to the end of his days. Hideo Saito is considered one of Japan’s greatest music teachers.

Did the diarist Samuel Pepys alert us to women conductors in 17th century London? There we went and eat and drank and heard musique at the Globe, and saw the simple motion that is there of a woman with a

Trench warfare, which has since been described as “futility in conflict,” gained its horrifying notoriety on the Western Front in the First World War. By the time the dust and poisonous gas clouds had settled on the “war to end

The late-19th and early 20th centuries saw a new phenomenon: all-women orchestras. Kept out of the traditional orchestras by reason of gender (it certainly wasn’t because of talent), women musicians came together to form their own orchestras.

When considering the piano repertoire, and piano instrumental music, we tend to focus on the big works in the canon – the great concertos and piano sonatas, and large-scale works like the Goldberg, Diabelli or Handel Variations, or the Rhapsody

Gaspar Cassadó was another distinguished virtuoso and composer of cello music. His Requiebros, and Dance of the Green Devil are two encore pieces we cellists love to play.

In our commercially-driven modern times “success” tends to be measured in monetary terms, and those people who have achieved the dizzy heights of a very large salary and financial security long into the future are generally regarded as “successful”.

Beatrice Harrison (1892-1965), our next featured cellist, lived when the cello was beginning to flourish. Harrison was the leading British cellist of her day— the first woman cellist to play at Carnegie Hall, in 1913, the first woman soloist with