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
Tomorrow, I’m off to Oxford to present a paper at the 19th Biennial International Nineteenth-Century Music Conference. It’s a topic which may divide, as well as (hopefully) interest: singing Lieder in English, and both the historical precedence for doing so, and the current performers and writers who are trying it
In my very first year at senior school, a teacher gave an excellent assembly in which he told the tale of those four well-known characters, Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. It’s quite a popular story – you might have heard it before. It’s called ‘That’s not my job’: There was
In response to last week’s blog, I had a suggestion from a friend of mine, the creator of the fabulous Dave Conservatoire, to take on one of the big topics of music today: the relationship between ‘commercial’ music and ‘serious’ music. (No pressure there then.) So in true sticking-to-the-point style,
