Grace williams

Leigh Lawson has embraced acting and poetry with the same determination that sustained Marie Lloyd, the music-hall queen whose memorabilia he collects, as Carla Passino discovers

Some years ago, Colin Matthews – a lifelong Londoner – bought himself a composing retreat on the Somerset/ Dorset borders and half-seriously confessed to fears that the view of cows from his windows ‘

After the premiere of his orchestral piece Coptic Light in 1986, Morton Feldman was described by an irate American critic as ‘the most boring composer in the history of music’. Listeners coming to his

There was once a time when native New Yorkers like Aaron Copland and Ferde Grofé composed odes to the American West; when Europeans like Darius Milhaud and Frederick Delius extolled the deep South; an

Soon after landing in England in the autumn of 1326, Isabella of France, estranged wife of Edward II, and her mercenary army mustered in Cambridge. The fenland town had acquired a second college just

There’s a trepidatious growl from the contra-bassoon. Soon, it is joined by French horns, strings and timpani; the sound rumbles, snowballs – and then: abrupt silence. The piano sings into the stillne