Music
What makes a good title?
Liszt’s compositions tend to have descriptive titles – ‘Wild Chase’; ‘Dreams of Love’ – whereas Chopin avoided titles. Thomas Wentworth…
I’m not the only football-obsessed composer
I was in Sweden a few weeks ago, where my music was presented in Stockholm in the most recent International…
The otherworldly artist who made his name at The Spectator
There is something otherworldly about Rory McEwen’s paintings of plants, leaves and fruit. They are indisputably beautiful, often breathtakingly so,…
‘Judgment is the price of being creative’: Rory Sutherland and Rick Rubin in conversation
Rick Rubin is a legendary American record producer who co-founded Def Jam records, which helped popularise hip hop. He has…
The Westminster Wag to watch
Surely charity is about helping others, not massaging your own ego? Ed Sheeran’s boycott of Band Aid is yet another example of…
Do you like the century you’re in?
Years ago Lord Patten of Barnes – Chris – was our guest for my Great Lives programme on BBC Radio…
Manacorda’s thrills and spills at Prom 72
At a Hollywood party in the 1940s, the garrulous socialite Elsa Maxwell spotted Arnold Schoenberg, then teaching music at UCLA,…
Ten times better than Taylor Swift: Romance, by Fontaines D.C., reviewed
Grade: B+ Almost all modern popular music is afflicted by a desperate yearning for importance, and thus – as it…
My night with the worst kind of nostalgia
American Football are a band whose legend was formed by the internet: some Illinois college kids who made an album…
Don’t look back in anger… it’s just how ticket sales work
We expect Ryanair tickets to cost more on holiday Saturdays than term-time Tuesdays and Uber fares to surge in the…
Saved from certain death at Auschwitz – by playing the cello
Exploring the relationship between the cello and its player, Kate Kennedy describes how Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s musical gift enabled her to survive not just one but two Nazi death camps
The mystery of teaching composition
Summer study courses for young composers have been popular for a few generations. After the second world war, up-and-coming experimental…
Complain all you like but Glastonbury has delivered the goods again
There’s yet to be a Glastonbury line-up that hasn’t provoked a chorus of naysaying. Refrains like ‘looks rubbish. I wouldn’t…
‘Psychedelic folk that twists and leaps’: Beth Gibbons, at the Barbican, reviewed
A decade ago, a group of people who owned small music venues came to the conclusion that the kinds of…
An absolute earful
Singing sands, the dawn chorus and the crackle of the Northern Lights are among the many natural wonders explored in Caspar Henderson’s paean to the act of listening
Travels in Italy with the teenage Mozart
Jane Glover follows the rapturous Wolfgang around Venice, Bologna, Florence and Naples on three journeys that would change the young composer’s life
Should vintage comedy be judged by today’s standards?
A successful joke relies on rhythm, tempo, cadence, pause – so why does David Stubbs find comedy and music so antithetical, wonders Joel Morris
The changing face of the BBC Proms
The changing face of the BBC Proms
Haunted by Old Russia: Rachmaninoff’s lonely final years
Exiled from Russia and often denigrated in America, Rachmaninoff lived in a fug of unbearable, impenetrable sadness, says Paul Kildea
My verdict on Eurovision
I had the sudden suspicion, at about ten o’clock on Saturday night, that I was the only straight male in…
Evil geniuses
Does knowledge of the wrongs committed by Caravaggio, Picasso, Roman Polanski and other ‘monsters’ condition our response to their art, wonders Claire Dederer
Sam Smith and the embarrassing terribleness of LGBTQIA+ culture
Pop music – and specifically pop music stardom – has an incredible power to transform people into things they are…
Artistic achievements that changed the world
‘Astonish me!’ was the celebrated demand that the impresario Sergei Diaghilev made of Jean Cocteau when he was devising Erik…
Recollections of a Queen’s piper
Memories of a Queen’s piper
Harpo Marx – genius, idiot savant or lovable overgrown child?
It’s hard (if not impossible) to imagine a world worth living in that doesn’t include the Marx Brothers; and equally…
