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...

'Nothing useful is of lasting value,' wrote the criminally underrated poet AR Ammons, whose work I discovered this week. I would say that...

The dialect I speak at home is a vague mixture of Tamil (the language spoken in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, parts of its...

One of my favourite features of the Italian language is the fact that the verb sapere can be used to mean both 'to know' and to 'taste.'...

Shortly before lockdown, as a birthday present to myself, I pre-ordered the final book of the Wolf Hall Trilogy and, on the day of its...

Can't believe I hadn't heard this before, but there we are. I'm not usually fond of idealising the past, but in terms of sheer raw...

Paddy Leigh Fermor has always been one of my favourite travel writers, ever since I read a collection of his letters (highly recommend)...

So I thought the world had exhausted all convincing interpretations of Chopin's excellent Op 48 no 1, until earlier today. Eduardus Halim...

If you, like me, ever made the mistake of avoiding Vaughan Williams, judging "flat weeping strings and nothing else," go check out his...

Boshniakovich plays Chopin It's often the case that recordings are a marvel in one aspect but not all. This is the case with Oleg...

So rediscovered Schumann's Symphonic Etudes yesterday and spent a while scouting for good recordings. I liked very much two of the...

I have a soft spot for this book, despite all the awful damsel-in-distress stereotyping. But only for the French original; in translation...

The parallels between the shimmering sea-funerals of Simon in Lord of the Flies and that of the sailor in The Tempest are probably...

Was fooling around with the ukulele I never really learnt how to play, trying to compose a song in French, when I realised the melody had...

Rather ironically, on the occasion of Gabriel Fauré's birthday, I'd encourage you to listen to the amazing Introit and Kyrie of his...