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

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

Works by Bach, Vivaldi and Marcello Amandine Beyer (violin); Gli Incogniti Harmonia Mundi HMM90276970 134 mins The communicative warmth and infectious vitality of Amandine Beyer’s performances will ha

Anyone walking down Manhattan’s West 28th Street in the early 20th century would have heard the clanging of multiple pianos – a cacophony that earned it the nickname ‘Tin Pan Alley’. It was the heart