At the beginning of the 1870s, Smetana faced a rising number of challenges to his position of artistic director of Prague’s opera ensemble. From this tense and pressured period for the composer sprang a work […]
Alastair Macaulay writes movingly about a musician he greatly admired: John Cage (1912-1992) died thirty-two years ago today, a few weeks before his eightieth birthday. Merce Cunningham, his life partner, came home from rehearsals […]
Not Schubert’s best tune, perhaps, but one known to a significant proportion of the human race – with the exception of the bots employed by Youtube. The Google-owned video site has blocked a Samsung washing-maching […]