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...

I hate to choose a melancholy piece for the occasion, but Schumann's first Dawn Song is a thing of too achingly unique beauty, a...

It's always a pleasure to find one of those recordings which makes you go "This piece can sound like that?' Vladimir de Pachmann's...

In Italo Calvino's famous work Invisible Cities, Marco Polo, a native Venetian, describes to the Chinese emperor the various cities he...

Today marks 30 years since Tom Stoppard's dazzling play Arcadia opened at the National Theatre. Praise and analysis of the work's...

'‘Who keeps his mind of childhood, keeps his mind,' writes Antonio Porchia. If any writer did, it's Beverly Cleary, who would have turned...

No better occasion than Rachmaninov's 150th birthday to celebrate some fine recordings of his works. The last two have been mentioned in...

Yeats, and a single but breathtaking fragment from the poet Herbert Trench, had set me hunting for good translations of Irish Gaelic myth...

Being a little pressed for time recently, I don't have time for a full-fledged post to mark Chopin's birthday (which fell last...

I recently discovered Janáček's In the Mists, one of the most hauntingly beguiling pieces I've heard since Chopin's first nocturne,...

Music: Sibelius 7. Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. 'And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you...

Yesterday marked the 222nd birthday of Beethoven- an event this blog can't justifiably skate over. So here's the gorgeous introduction of...

A weekend of unexpected gifts. Visiting Toulouse, I walked into the city's breathtaking Basilique Saint-Sernin to be greeted by gusts of...

In terms of interpretative difficulty, among Chopin's works, only the mazurkas outshine the E minor concerto. The first movement in...

Freakish coincidence. The Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet's poems are normally too dark and vague for me, but I thought earlier today that...

Igor Levit- yes, the guy who made THAT Hammerklavier recording- stopped over in London recently to play the Emperor with the London...

Went to my first live concert in absolutely ages this week. Arrangements of both Western and Chinese music for two flutes and piano...

A rather juvenile narrative poem (below) I once wrote, inspired by Chopin's Fourth Ballade, is prefaced by a disclaimer that it is...