The fight to be heard

Why we need orchestras

It’s generally accepted that provision for music in the UK’s state schools is patchy, varying hugely from one local borough to another and one school to another, according to the importance placed on

Picture the scene: you’re about to get up on stage to give a presentation or performance. Something feels off – you look down, and realise your shirt is missing; in fact, you have no clothes on at all

TARIQUE RAHMAN HAS LOST HIS VOICE. THAT ISN’T IDEAL for the aspiring leader of Bangladesh, the South Asian nation of 175 million. It’s also tinged with irony since, as his homeland’s de facto oppositi

There has been a tectonic fragility to the early weeks of 2026, the uneasy sense of an old world shifting. New horror in Syria, Venezuela, Greenland, Iran; ongoing terror in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan. In t

‘We’re going to have a tonal centre and tap our feet, and that’s the way it is.’ Steve Reich is in full flow, talking to me from his home in New York. ‘The big break, the knife down the line, was betw