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

As part of my research for meeting Seong-Jin Cho, I learned that Korean names tend to have specific meanings. But I also found several variants (in translation, naturally) of his own moniker. One of m

MATEUS ASATO IS the kind of guitarist we haven’t heard much of lately — a true original. He doesn’t do anything particularly outrageous or revolutionary — there’s no crazy gimmick (yet) that he’ll be

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