In defence of the libretto and the librettist

‘I felt that I should like to kiss the hands that had awakened a new world of music for me.’ The year was 1888, the occasion was the Paris debut of a 27-year-old pianist named Ignacy Jan Paderewski. A

The secret meaning of Vermeer’s art

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

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

‘Searching for music is like searching for God… there’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable.’ So reckoned the great David Bowie, and few have ‘searche