Crusading conductor

I have Sir Neville Marriner to thank for pointing me in the direction of the podium. It was in conversation after a long Academy of St Martin in the Fields tour of Germany in 2004 that Sir Neville fir

There comes a point in life for most of us when we say, enough. We say goodbye to responsibilities that had begun to feel more like obligations, and we either seek new challenges, or find joy in what

It was the Viennese critic Hermann Bahr who likened Mahler’s arrival in a hotel lobby to a gust of wind forcing open a window, or water bursting from a pipe. There’s something similarly elemental abou

BIRKENAU’S WOMEN’S ORCHESTRA

On Friday 18 July, at the hands of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its chief conductor Sakari Oramo, the BBC Proms will be launched into life with Bliss’s Birthday Fanfare for Sir Henry Wood – two minu

Bringing home the dead Oleksii Yukov spends his ...