Some thoughts on opera, funding, and finding audiences… At the end of a week where the game of two halves rather lost its equal opportunities for both sides, newspaper and online debate has produced a raft of articles concerning a slightly different kind of inequality. When the 2015-18 Arts Council funding
Happy 4th July, one and all! And to the staff and students at the Royal College of Music, where I have studied and worked for the last eight years, congratulations on reaching the end of another great adventure of an academic year. It’s been exhausting, exciting, challenging, fulfilling, and packed
A few months ago, in pursuit of a fact-checking mission for a project I was working on, I found myself signing up to gain access the truly remarkable Warburg Institute in Bloomsbury. The collection was begun in Hamburg early in the twentieth century by Aby Warburg, a brilliant scholar with
If this week’s post is both a little later, and a little less coherent than its predecessors, I offer apologies. I have just returned (well, very late last night) from a wonderful week in sunny Toronto, where I attended the 18th Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music – and this
This week, I was looking forward to picking from a host of possible topics for discussion. I had lovely suggestions from the folk at Opera Talk, pressing issues from papers and discussion boards, and a range of subjects in my ever-expanding ‘list of things to blog about’. But instead, I
This afternoon, as I struggled along the pavement outside Waterloo station, ducking and weaving between people who were simultaneously walking, texting, fiddling with their iPods, trying to read the paper and so on, I started thinking about how used we’ve all become to doing more than one thing at a
It’s that time of year again when school and university students up and down the country are facing deadline days and examinations. Assignment writing through the night on coffee and energy tablets, revision cramming as you struggle down the corridor towards the exam room… we all know the drill. And
It’s been a stormy week for the opera world, as I’m sure everyone is well aware, following a number of extraordinary remarks from critics of leading British newspapers regarding the physical attributes of Tara Erraught in Glyndebourne’s current production of Der Rosenkavalier. There was (quite rightly) a loud shout of
