There's really very little I can say about Gould which has not already been exhausted, so I'm going to let this snippet from Bach Partita...

No more magnificent way to open a blog post than with the roof of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. Here Apollo presents Italy's...

Today marks the 125th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges- one of my most important literary influences growing up. It wasn't his weird and...

Word of the week: the Anglo-Saxon adjective ælf-scīne, 'elf-bright,' or beautiful. I spent an exhilarating evening listening to the...

Reading an old paper by Leigh Henry on Celtic music, I came across a wonderful anecdote worth reading in full (I do miss the days when...

' It is far easier to be sensible in cities than in many country places I could tell you of,' observes Yeats in The Celtic Twilight....

Today marks 107 years since the death of the British poet and writer Edward Thomas, one of the most simply, honestly lyrical voices of...

I always go back to a line from Purgatorio whose effect, I think, was much elevated through a stroke of inspiration from the translator...

From Irish Fairytales, by James Stephens. A young boy, Fionn, finds the poet Finegas fishing by the river, and upon enquiring why, they...

Today marks 85 years since the passing of WB Yeats, who first introduced me to the heartstopping beauty of Irish myth, and is one of a...

There's an interesting parallel between King Lear and the story of the Indian demon king Prahrada (or Prahlada), in that I always took...

A longer blog post is coming shortly, but for now I just wish to mark the 121st birthday of the criminally underrated Hungarian-American...

Reading Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus I came across the lines: 'Music, too, keeps building anew with the insecurest stones her celestial...

Once in a while, you hear a recording which seems to reduce all other interpretations to homogeneous mush. And once in an even longer...

Reading the Aeneid this week I came across the wonderful passage in which Aeneas, landing in Carthage, comes across murals of the Trojan...

French Renaissance songs are very fond of farewells, and these two examples- Josquin's Mille Regretz and Dufay's Adieu, ces bons vins-...

'Then a change began slowly to declare itself. The horizon became clearer, field and tree came more into sight, and somehow with a...

Travelling across Lake Como last weekend, the ferry stopped at the village of Torno. Between the houses ran narrow little paths with...

Certain images conjured up by poets stay with you for a lifetime. Borges, in a wonderful essay, quite rightly singles out as 'perfectly...

Vitaly Morgulis's criminally underrated Op 10 no 2 recording can languish no longer in the recesses of YouTube. The voicing was so...