Hans-günter heumann beginners keyboard class

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

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

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

Marc-André Hamelin (piano) Hyperion CDA67077 The People United has been recorded regularly over its 50 years, from Ursula Oppens in 1978 to a recent, recommendable version by the young Bulgarian piani

National Symphony Orchestra/ Gianandrea Noseda NSO NSO0022 75:12 mins Mahler’s mad-cap Seventh is the toughest of his symphonies to conceptualise and to execute. Lacking any explicit programme, two of

Kammerorchester Basel/Giovanni Antonini Alpha ALPHA1092 76:29 mins The most familiar of the symphonies here, if only because it has a nickname, is No. 55, whose ‘Schoolmaster’ title arises out of the