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

Georges Bizet is probably not the first name to come to mind when we think of French composers of piano music. Indeed, few of us would think of Bizet as a piano composer at all, such is the towering s

Retracing Our Steps (2007–2014) KSCOPE

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

Steven C Smith Oxford University Press 978-0-197-68128-2 312pp (hb) £31.99 Theirs remains one of the most thrilling composer-director collaborations of all time, and while Bernard Herrmann and Alfred