I have GOT to tell you about the week I just had. It was incredible. And busy – very busy – but worth all the prep, the travel, the early starts and late nights, the frantic library trips in the lead-up. It went like this: Saturday – Live broadcast on
Yesterday morning I had the very great pleasure of being a guest on BBC Radio 3’s Record Review, chatting to Chris O’Reilly of Presto Classical and our lovely host Andrew McGregor about a host of new releases and – since it was Record Store Day – how people consume recorded
One of my deadlines to meet this past week has been the completion of a lengthy essay – more like a book chapter, actually – for this summer’s Salzburg Festival. Between 15 and 22 August, Teodor Currentzis and musicAeterna (of the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theatre in Perm) will give
It’s Sunday morning, and I’m sitting in the Feathers Hotel in Ludlow, bags half-packed, getting ready to chair the last of three panel discussions I’ve been overseeing here at the Ludlow English Song Weekend. The weekend’s programme, masterfully constructed by Iain Burnside, has been an exploration of Ireland – and
Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while now might remember that last year, I took the plunge and learned how to drive. I was fortunate to have a fantastic teacher, glorious good weather over the summer in Suffolk, and an examiner who, whilst slightly baffling
It’s the end of term, and I’ve spent an amount of the last few weeks talking to undergraduate students at Middlesex University about their big written projects, due in early May. They are, as ever, in various stages of completion: from almost full drafts, to agonising blank pages. And it
There is something rather interesting about the last word of the title to this post. Have you ever noticed? On the one hand, we use it to refer to someone who is superlatively good at what they do, someone in a league of their own, you might say. Someone who
It only seems like five minutes ago that I was making terrible titular puns about the white stuff on here, but here were are again, at the start of spring, gazing out at snow drifts. Well, mostly I’m now gazing out at a grey rainy day destroying the snow drifts.
If you are a keen musician, and you want to give a concert at the glorious Foundling Museum, where I am fortunate enough to be Public Events Programmer, you are required to fill in a form that I designed not long after starting the job. It’s not particularly complicated. You
Last week, the psychologist and author Steven Pinker published a lengthy article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called ‘The Intellectual War on Science’. In it, he discusses at some length the vilification of science in the popular press, and indeed in university training (he’s primarily talking about the USA,
