The premiere performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem took place on 30 May 1962 at the consecration ceremony for the New Coventry Cathedral. The original fourteenth-century structure had been destroyed in a World War II bombing raid, and the work

When we hear music originating from the ancient shores of the Baltic Sea, we immediately think of the Estonian composers Veljo Tormis and Arvo Pärt. Of course, they are very famous right now, but their successes built on the ground-breaking

By winning First Prize at the Chopin International Competition in Warsaw in 2015, Seong-Jin Cho immediately rose to international prominence. Signing an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon in 2016, Cho has established himself as one of the leading pianists of

I haven’t touched the piano for six months. I have a beautiful early 20th-century Bechstein model A grand piano which has been sitting, untouched, in my piano room/office. There is music open on the stand – Schubert’s Piano Sonata in

Igor Stravinsky’s first opera The Nightingale, to his own libretto in collaboration with Stepan Mitusov and based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale, premiered at the Opéra in Paris on 26 May 1914. The marvellously colourful production was commissioned by

If you saw the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final in May, then you saw two different groups with instruments far out of the norm. The Norwegian group Gåte played Ulveham (Wolf Pelt), which is based on a medieval Norwegian

50 years ago to the day, on 24 May 1974, America mourned the passing of its arguably greatest composers. Without doubt, Duke (Edward Kennedy) Ellington was the greatest jazz composer and bandleader of his time. One of the originators of

There is an exclusivity to the approaches to composing music, as opposed to all other artistic forms. It is that music can be created through at least two different mediums. The one of the instrument or the one of the