Song of courage

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

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,

There’s no shortage of great picks at this year’s TEFAF Maastricht, the Netherlands, including a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, a pastel portrait by Dora Maar and two sections of 4th-century Roman mosaics

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

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

When the phone rings and it’s Daniel Hope, a useful starter to the conversation is to ask where in the world he’s ringing from. And though he’ll jokily reply, ‘I’m sometimes not so sure’, it isn’t muc