Harnoncourt on Mozart

Harnoncourt on Mozart

On my desk this week is the Mozart Requiem, a piece I’m coming back to for the first time since 2002. I can scarcely think of a piece by any composer that affects me the way this one does. It is not easy music to study- it is as terrifying, as personal and as painful...

Radio 3- Dancing the Apocalypse

Run, don’t walk, to your computer to listen to this wonderful feature on Ravel’s La Valse  on BBC iPlayer until Friday this week. Called “Dancing the Apocalypse” it’s about as good as the BBC gets at really getting to grips with a major...

Prokofiev on Prokofiev

Serge Prokofiev, writing about the Fifth Piano Concerto in his Autobiography-   If we discount the Fourth Concerto for left hand, more than ten years had passed since I had written a piano concerto. Since then my conception of the treatment of this form had changed...