Ruggero leoncavallo

Music is a serious business. Whether it’s love, death, heartbreak, loneliness, power, conflict, destruction, sin, faith, hope, despair… you name it, every weighty subject and state of mind has been ta

In December 1838, a few days after Berlioz had conducted a concert of his own works that included Harold in Italy, a four-movement ‘symphony with principal viola’, the composer found that his bank bal

On the morning of 9 January 1905 (22 January on the New Style calendar Soviet Russia later adopted), a crowd of striking workers marched peacefully through Saint Petersburg towards the Winter Palace,

Inspired by the Walter Scott novel, Berlioz’s Rob Roy of 1831 celebrates the Jacobite outlaw in a 15-minute overture for orchestra. Though he liked the main melody enough to re-use it in Harold in Ita

Yunchan Lim (piano) Decca 4871517 77 mins That Yunchan Lim is a remarkable pianist is self-evident in everything he plays. But let’s hope he doesn’t pay too much heed to the hype his singular talent a

Antoine Tamestit (viola) Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble/ Marc Minkowski Naive V5266 The famous Scottish violist William Primrose made the first ever studio recording of Harold in Italy with the Bost