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

As a rookie BBC radio presenter, I soon learned that lists of things don’t transmit well over the airwaves. Tricky for listeners to digest. OK, but when it comes to justifying here in print the status

WHEN Kate had decided, at the age of fifty-five, to reduce her working hours and go part-time at her job, she had imagined filling her extra days off with all kinds of exciting adventures. Instead, sh

The perhaps wisely uncredited author of the piece about Tellef Johnson’s premiere of Sorabji’s Piano Sonata No. 5 (Full Score, February) seeks to claim ‘due seriousness’ for their report. The presumed

When the phone rings and it’s Daniel Hope, a useful starter to the conversation is to ask where in the world he’s ringing from. And though he’ll jokily reply, ‘I’m sometimes not so sure’, it isn’t muc

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