In the last few weeks, Classic FM has made several big announcements. Celebrating its 25th birthday this year, it reported in early August that listening figures for the station were at around 5.8 million, with a substantial percentage of these being under-35s; and also produced a list of the biggest-selling
In the early 1990s, as I finished primary school and got ready to take on a new uniform and a new place to start my senior education, I spent several years learning Latin. I was already speaking French, and had been learning it since I was pretty young; but in
OK, I’ll admit, it would have been a much weirder film if Disney had decided to animate a tiny ocean-dwelling Beethoven who had to be rescued from a dentist’s fish tank. (Although possibly I should copyright this idea in case there are any avant-garde film makers reading it.) But yes:
In 2003, the final episode of the brilliant, funny, smart and excellently subversive Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired on US television. It took a bit longer for ‘Chosen’ to reach us Buffy obsessives in the UK, but I’d be willing to bet that the speech Buffy gives to her army
This weekend, I have been perched on a piano stool in the recital room at City Lit, playing Handel. As part of the organisation’s annual summer school, we spent a happy two days running a ‘Come and Sing’ event on a couple of Handel’s Coronation anthems – the kind of
Last week saw my annual visit to the beautiful Howardian Hills in Yorkshire, for the glorious Ryedale Festival. This is the third year in a row that I’ve had the privilege of speaking at Ryedale, and for the first time this year I was not there primarily to work with
Years ago, when I was still at school, I was strong-armed into joining the school public speaking team. This was a rather entertaining activity which involved choosing a topic you wanted to debate, and putting forward a presentation, dealing with questions, chairing the discussion, and all that jazz. We weren’t
It’s mid-July, school’s out (or almost!), and my walk into town over the past few weeks has often involved passing slightly worried teenagers fresh out of exams, consulting each other on how much detail they went into when discussing the Bay of Pigs in question three. At the time, I
If you were watching this website a fortnight ago, you will have come across a post I wrote called ‘Tale Spin’, and the challenges (so-called) of writing a biography for someone like Brahms who, in comparison with some of his wilder contemporaries, did not really live the kind of life
Now that July has arrived, I’m about to have to start knuckling down to work again – to preparation for talks and notes for a whole host of wonderful things, including the Ryedale Festival, the Oxford Lieder Festival, the North Norfolk Music Festival and some forthcoming summer courses at City
