A secret language

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

‘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

I AM someone who loves space. This is perhaps because of early childhood days on the beautiful Solway Coast. My father’s family farm was right on the beach. It enjoyed uninterrupted views across to th

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

Andrey Gugnin (piano) Hyperion CDA684712 83 mins This album of Russian ballet transcriptions sparkles like a glass bauble hanging amidst the fairy lights. Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky wrote so colourful

On entering a room containing a piano, what pianist doesn’t turn white at the command, ‘You can play – let’s hear you!’ You thought you were visiting friends, not giving a performance, so of course yo