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

Lidy Blijdorp; Tobias Borsboom Channel Classics CCS47726 65:29 mins Using the recording genre creatively is an art in itself. What can it offer that perhaps a live concert cannot? I think it allows mo

Joyce DiDonato (mezzo), Time for Three Platoon PLAT29101 65:05 mins Is it a song cycle? An opera? Musical theatre? Kevin Puts’s new work Emily – No Prisoner Be, based on texts by Emily Dickinson, is a

Had Robin Holloway published Music’s Odyssey—described by its author as “an invitation to the glorious long voyage of Western classical music”—30 years ago, he might well have got away with it. By day

Ubiquitous pre-concert routines feature furtive programme reading and, for the truly organised, ordering interval refreshments. Activities do not usually include brushing one’s teeth and changing into

‘They shut me up in Prose – As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet – Because they liked me “still”.’ The words (and eccentric capitalisation) are Emily Dickinson’s, the opening salvo in a bol