Maurizio Pollini, Royal Festival Hall, London Maurizio Pollini was, in his prime, arguably the greatest pianist in the world. In recent years there’s been a falling-off from his once immaculate ...Read More
Musics can die… I was born in Conwy, a fishing village in north Wales, and many of my earliest memories are of singing. The Second World War was at its darkest hour, and my father was fighting in Fr...Read More
Composer, belle-lettrist, polemicist, novelist, painter, teacher, and failed priest – as well as pianist – the newly-knighted Stephen Hough must sometimes lose track of his multifarious ac...Read More
Lars Vogt remembered, By Michael Church Can one play vibrato on the piano? Since it’s just a box of hammers, with each making only momentary contact with its string, the common-sense answer m...Read More
It’s an ill wind… Temporarily prevented from performing in Verbier by tendonitis in his left shoulder, Evgeny Kissin suddenly has time on his hands, and is in a mood, I’m told, to give an interv...Read More
Stephen Jones, the leading authority on Chinese village music, has written a review of Musics Lost and Found which takes my book’s argument further, in many interesting directions… Click here: To ...Read More
SOGHOMON SOGHOMONIAN was born in 1869 in Kütahya, an Armenian Christian enclave whose inhabitants suffered systematic oppression under the Ottoman yoke. Even those Armenians who could speak their anc...Read More
On Saturday 2 October, Radio 3’s Music Matters carried an item in which Tom Service and I discussed, with musical examples, the central argument of my new book Musics Lost and Found: Song Collectors...Read More
Is folk music dying? In my new book I suggest that it is, at least in Europe and North America, thanks to the globalisation, urbanisation, and industrialisation which is now eroding the worldâ€...Read More
Rule Britannia – and how the Tory media have capitalised on it By Michael Church From the Independent, 26.8.20 You couldn’t make it up. First the chronology. On Sunday, in what seemed like a k...Read More