One year to this very day, 5th July, I woke up to find myself unemployed, unaffiliated, and absolutely delighted about it. Last Independence Day (talk about appropriate), I celebrated my last day of working at the Royal College of Music, and stepped out into the unknown to try my hand
In the immortal words of Dr. Frasier Crane, ‘I’m listening’. Not to the mildly psychotic residents of Seattle, I hasten to add, but to a great many recordings – for most of the last week, I have been preparing for a slot on Radio 3’s ‘Building a Library’, to be
Since, for many people in Britain, 7th May currently has only the negative association of The Day We Voted In the Tories, I thought on this sunny, windswept Sunday that it was time we all focused, not on the blue (ha ha) associations of the date, but on something much
A couple of days ago, on my way to the British Library, I bumped into a friend who asked me what I was currently working on. Enthusiastic, as usual, to share stories about recent projects, I began reeling off some of the jobs currently on my to-do list: CD notes
After all the excitement of last week’s guest post from Kevin Malone, it’s back to me for the first post of February… Earlier this week, I made a trip to Nottingham’s Royal Concert Hall to give a pre-concert talk for a performance of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony by Sinfonia Viva. Any
Oh dear. As you can probably already guess from the title, this is going to get messy. Richard Taruskin’s Text and Act will be invoked. I’m going to get tetchy with oversimplified journalism. And there might be a bit of Brahms in here as well. Yeah, I’d be hiding too.
This week, I’ve mostly been thinking about virtuosos. As I was putting together my notes for a lecture on Paganini, Chopin and Liszt, and the transformation of the solo musician’s role in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, everything from repertoire choices and touring schedules to notions of
Last night, I went to see the musical Made in Dagenham at the Adelphi Theatre. I remembered the film very fondly, and if the songs turned out to be not all that memorable, the comic timing was superb (it’s worth it for Harold Wilson’s dance routine alone). Since I knew
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending my second conference of the year in sunny Antwerp. But following my voyage to Toronto back in June, this was a conference of a different hue: it was the annual conference of IAML, the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation
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
