Quietly tucked away in a secluded corner of eastern Saxony sits the town of Löbau. Small in size—currently counting less than 15,000 inhabitants—this settlement was first mentioned in 1221. But what really put Löbau on the international radar was the

For countless visitors to the city of Salzburg, the Cathedral is one of the city’s major tourist attractions. The Frankish missionary Rupert founded the church in 774, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart received his baptism there on 28 January 1756. However,

What springs to mind when you think of Europe’s great music colleges? Germany? Britain? Austria? Take a leap north-east, and you’ll come across Sibelius Academy, unassumingly nestled in Helsinki’s University of the Arts, ranking at number 7 in the QS

In this week’s episode, I would like to introduce you to the largest piano manufacturer in the world! The Pearl River Piano Group was established in 1956 in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province in China, and it claims to produce the World’s

What do Queen Victoria, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Tsar Nicholas II, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and numerous others have in common? They all purchased and played instruments produced by the Leipzig piano manufacturer Blüthner. Around 1900, Blüthner was

Dmitri Shostakovich (1905-1975) had a hard and troubled career within the political machine that was the Soviet Union. At times the model composer and at others, the reviled modernist, he moved between the extremes of popularity and marginalization. His 11th

Pianos are highly versatile instruments, equally at home in luxurious concert halls, smokey pubs, middle-class living rooms and sweaty practice cubicles. Kawai instruments prominently feature in all those locations. However, the Kawai hybrid piano has also featured in one of

The “Great Depression” was the immediate result of the sudden devastating collapse of the US stock market on 29 October 1929. Known as “Black Tuesday,” it plunged the world into a severe economic downturn in the 1930’s. Construction virtually halted