Who doesn’t love their pets and animals in general? Musicians do too of course. According to musicians, our pets are quite musical. Leave it to us to make musical jokes about them. In case you thought I’d exhausted all our

Konstantin Lifschitz stunned the international music scene with his recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in 1994. The recording received a Grammy nomination and was celebrated as the most convincing Bach interpretation since Glenn Gould. Critics praised his “joy and energy

American composer Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980) has been given the title of ‘Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart’ and in 2018, was one of the first two women commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera (the other composer commissioned was Jeanine Tesori). She attended the

Olga Maria Elisabeth Frederike Schwarzkopf was born in Jarocin near Poznán, then Germany, now Poland, on 9 December 1915. She was to become the pre-eminent female lieder singer of the post-war decades and an operatic artist “in whom personal beauty,

In the years preceding World War II, Bohuslav Martinů was a much-respected composer experimenting with jazz, folk, and avant-garde creations in Paris. Forced to flee to the United States in 1940, he soon became the living composer whose works were

Among the crowning glories of German and Italian opera are The Magic Flute, Tristan and Isolde, La Traviata, Tosca, Norma, and Aida; English opera has Balfe’s “Bohemian Girl” which is barely ever performed, Britten’s “Peter Grimes” whose chief attributes are

When Johannes Brahms first met Richard Wagner in 1863 he played his Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24 for the prophet of the “Artwork of the Future.” The work sounds like an impressive catalogue of variation

Krystian Zimerman is one of the rare cult figures among pianists today. In fact, there are not enough superlatives to describe his pianism, or what he calls “the art of organising emotions in time.” Anything he touches reveals infinite expressive