This week has involved a great deal of travelling. The downside of this is the hours of time it eats, and in this season of ever darkening days, the sure knowledge that the beautiful sunny vista that you can see from the train window will have vanished into pitch black
On Saturday evening, I had the pleasure of returning to the city where I spent five happy years as a university student – Nottingham – to give a pre-concert talk about Brahms’s First Symphony. As the train rumbled north out of London, I spent a bit of time staring out
Categorization. We humans love it. We have constructed endless words – nay, entire vocabularies – to classify groups of everything from mildew and tree moss to stamp collectors and bee keepers. Categories allow us to track general trends, whether they be historical (for example, popular opinions via certain newspaper columns)
Some thoughts on opera, funding, and finding audiences… Staying with opera and cultural attitudes, there are a few other recent stories worth throwing into the mix here. One is a debate in The Guardian from early June between Stephen Moss and Bonnie Greer: ‘Does it matter that arts audiences are
