Perfect finnish

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

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

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

As Alison Balsom prepares to return to the Proms, Marie-Claire Chappet sits down with the classical trumpeter to discuss success, self-improvement and the unifying power of music

● ONE MORNING IN 2007 I KNOCKED at ...

November 1989: inside a Manchester warehouse, guitarist John Squire is busy pouring cans of paint over himself and the rest of his band, The Stone Roses. Suddenly, he stops. “We’ve been stitched up he