BACH: News #1

Masaaki Suzuki has finally completed his project to record the complete church cantatas of JS Bach. But what has been driving this quiet Japanese musician to tackle one of the greatest achievements in Western music? Lindsay Kemp travels to Kobe to find out Continues HERE

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STRING QUARTETS: News

Rebecca Morelle writes: Scientists have come up with a way to reveal the pecking order within a string quartet. A team from the Royal Academy of Music and the University of Birmingham found that analysing how individual musicians vary their timing to follow the rest of the group can indicate a hierarchy. They say it […]

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SYMPHONIES: Why?

GRAMOPHONE MAGAZINE:   ‘I would like to think we might now be in a phase when composers no longer seek merely to impress with complexity’ Why write symphonies? People often ask me this. They are probably mindful that I’ve spent most of my active life composing for the media. First it was TV commercials – […]

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VALERY GERGIEV: News

  The maestro tells Andrew Stewart about his passion for Slavic culture – and Putin It takes less than a minute to rattle Valery Gergiev. He looks irritated while I mention the names of several younger Russian musicians whose careers are located firmly in the West, Vladimir Jurowski and Vasily Petrenko among them. The 59-year-old’s […]

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” … and it’s a triumph of creative risk” – writes Martin Chilton of The Guardian.

“Classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein and country-folk singer Tift Merritt have collaborated on a joint album called Night — and it’s a triumph of creative risk” – writes Martin Chilton of The Guardian. Musical collaborations can sometimes be tired sparring sessions, but classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein and folk-country singer-songwriter Tift Merritt have worked on an album, […]

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GLENN GOULD: News

It’s 30 years since the death of Glenn Gould, but the pianist still provokes strong reactions. So how do today’s top players assess his legacy? It still sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard, however many times you listen to it: Glenn Gould’s first recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, made in 1955, has an energy, an intensity […]

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GARETH MALONE: News

Cole Moreton finds out! Is Gareth Malone really as nice as people think? He’ll happily coax a weeping military wife or a distressed shop keeper into singing through the tears, but when was the last time he put himself on the line and sang in public? “I had to choose the music for the funeral […]

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