In the mid-1980s one of my music teachers was the composer and recorder player Ian Shanahan. I once asked him why he loved and played the recorder? His reply still rings true today. “No one ever told me that the

She took piano lessons with Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, studied composition with Anton Reicha, a friend of Beethoven’s, and renowned violinist Joseph Joachim performed in the premiere of her nonet for wind and strings. During her lifetime, Louise

What is music? And what is noise? These questions have always been lingering in my mind – without any absolute solution. As one of our contributors, Rob, eloquently discussed, there is no consensual agreement on a singular definition of music.

Most students probably expect their teacher to be able to play anything, and indeed the best teachers will have a comprehensive repertoire coupled with extensive knowledge. One need not have played all the Beethoven Piano Sonatas or Chopin’s Etudes in

Finals with Zlatomir Fung The Tchaikovsky Competition, the Olympics of music held every four years, is arguably the most important competition for young musicians between the ages of 16 and 32. The major monetary prizes are but a small part.

Vibrato can make you feel more than what is intended. String instruments pronounce it, woodwinds make it felt, brass, well maybe it only slightly works for them, but the human voice excels with applied vibrato. Select and functional vibrato can

The 16th edition of the Tchaikovsky International Competition has finished (and not without controversy, but that’s another story….) and another crop of prize winners have been crowned and launched onto the international music scene. French pianist Alexandre Kantorow was awarded

Iván Erőd was born the son of a businessman in Budapest in 1936 amidst the brewing catastrophe of World War II. In fact, his brother and his grandparents were murdered in Buchenwald and Auschwitz in 1944, and his parents barely