So, enough of my solo soapboxing – on with the interviews. I had the huge pleasure of speaking to Lucy Schaufer and Christopher Gillett, both highly regarded performers in their own right (amongst many other skills, as they will reveal imminently). They are also the creators of the production company
A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be part of a filming project at the Wigmore Hall. I hadn’t been to any live music (indoor or outdoor) for months, let alone inside a concert venue. We arrived at the front door as agreed, masks on. The door
Christopher Glynn is a highly successful pianist – a song accompanist and chamber musician – as well as being the artistic director of the Ryedale Festival in North Yorkshire, which usually runs for two weeks in July. Since the festival couldn’t go ahead as normal, RyeStream was created to share a series of performances filmed
Those of you who follow me on Twitter might have seen a particularly effusive tweet I posted on Friday evening, after a stunning evening of music at the Wigmore Hall given by Alice Coote and Julius Drake. It bore the title, ‘I myself am the enemy who must be loved?
Today, I’m off to the Wigmore Hall to hear a new English-language translation, by Jeremy Sams, of Schubert’s Winterreise, performed by Roderick Williams and Christopher Glynn. I was fortunate enough to hear this at the Ryedale Festival in July, and can’t wait to listen again – it’s an astonishing piece
In the midst of a flurry of Schubert, a broadcast on Medici TV and the general celebratory noises emanating from the Wigmore Hall last week as they reach their 115th birthday, you could be forgiven for having missed something which (to this music researcher, anyway) is more exciting than all
News and drama. The two are, in modern terms, basically inseparable: stories hit the headlines precisely because they are dramatic, that things are at crisis point, that heads may roll. This is what makes for column inches. And also, as it happens, stirring opera plots. Appropriately enough, then, the New
This week, I’ve mostly been thinking about talking. In part, this has been selfish thinking – finding the necessary language and expression of ideas and opinions for reviewing, as discussed in last week’s post, in advance of a very jolly recording session with Andrew McGregor for this week’s CD Review.
As the university and school terms have finally come to an end, and lecture planning can go on hold for a little while at least, I’ve spent the majority of this week reading up for various sets of concert programme and CD notes in the comfort of the British Library.
The last few weeks have been a time of many people saying even more loudly than usual that the humanities are important to our society. Following Nicky Morgan’s insistence that STEM subjects were the best choice for students who wanted to keep their job options as broad as possible, critics,
