Latvia may occupy a large territory, but its population of 1.7 million would fit into a small corner of London, and its road to independence has been long and hard. It endured centuries of Swedish, Po...Read More
‘Why haven’t we heard about phages before?’ asked Evan Davis brightly on the ‘PM’ programme on May 2. He was referring to the ‘new’ miracle cure which had jus...Read More
BBC Young Musician 40th Anniversary, Royal Albert Hall With Brexit threatening to unpick all the things which make life worth living in Britain, it behoves us to count our spoons (as the old saying go...Read More
Highgate Choral Society – a musical community like no other The reading was to take place in a rough-and-ready little theatre under a Waterloo railway arch. The title of the play was Short Memory, a...Read More
Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s performance of eighteen Ligeti Etudes at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on May 12 – faster than ever, and negotiating without missing a beat the collapse of several loos...Read More
Chineke! Queen Elizabeth Hall Over the last half-century the outbuildings of the Royal Festival Hall have been threatened with one grandiose makeover after another: people have always been ambi...Read More
Opera moves with the times: it’s no surprise that a Carmen in tune with the #metoo movement should open in Florence, with the exasperated heroine shooting her jealous lover dead. But that’s...Read More
Drum children There’s a felicitous double meaning in Kodo, the name of the celebrated Japanese drumming ensemble. Its written characters mean ‘drum child’, but an infinitesimally different...Read More
‘If I were a gambler,’ I wrote in The Independent seventeen years ago, ‘I’d put serious money on a 23-year-old Russian mezzo who will make her discreet solo UK debut in a Suffolk church...Read More
Emerging from a rare sabbatical, Evgeny Kissin – the world’s most acclaimed classical pianist – has just published his autobiography. He has also just married a childhood friend, and he’s ...Read More