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

Scattered in moveable sites around the streets and buildings of Hong Kong are decorated pianos that are all part of an international piano artwork by artist Luke Jerram. Since 2008, in more than 47 cities around the world, 1,500 street

In my youth, I spent countless Saturday and Sunday afternoons playing for weddings until I was finally able to buy my own wheels. Since playing for weddings does not really pay all that well, I had to settle for two