Lang Lang got a Christmas sweater

From Graham Spicer’s Gramilano: The Puccini Festival at Torre del Lago saw the opening of Manon Lescaut, the last opera of the 2025 open-air season, on Saturday 30 August. Giacomo Puccini wrote the opera at his home […]

Two dropped out in the week the competition started. A third, China’s Xiaofu Ju, withdrew ‘for medical reasons’ as the quarter-finalists were about to be announced.   The following 17 are still in the running: […]

From our agony aunt’s mailbag: Dear Alma, There’s a new player in our viola section and she wears a kind of hijab – a black headscarf that also covers her shoulders. For what I can […]