I watched with interest some of the Winter Olympics coverage from South Korea, in particular the snowboarding and skiing. It’s easy to spot the winners – people like Chloe Kim and Redmond Gerard (both from the US team): they display

Between 20th and 23rd November this year, the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire will be home to the first Birmingham International Piano Chamber Music Festival. Artists including the Gould Trio, London Bridge Trio, Katya Apekisheva, Christoph Richter, Esther Hoppe, Alice Neary, Robin

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.