Over the weekend of 1-3 April, 2022 I had the privilege of being involved in the inaugural Richard Gill Memorial Festival of Strings in...

This music comes from an opera which premiered in London in July 1963. It was written by an Australian and it garnered enormously...

Names and labels can be a problem in music. As Juliet says to Romeo: What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would...

The idea of "inspiration" is one we use a lot in music. Without thinking much about it, we often say a piece or a composer was inspired...

This blog has been focusing on opera in recent posts, looking at aspects of musical storytelling which opera does particularly well. So...

This post is the third in a series of four in which I'm looking at opera from a slightly different perspective, focusing on the sorts of...

In 1987, Peter Conrad, an Australian-born academic now based in the UK, published a book called A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of...

In 2015 I presented a series of four Keys to Music programs under the general heading of Focus on Opera. These looked in turn at mad...

The following article is based on a Keys To Music program which originally went to air in 2010 in response to the death of Sir Charles...

It's always fascinating to hear music by famous composers before they became famous and this music is a perfect example. At first...

If I said the words "Bach" and "Mass" in the same sentence, I think most music lovers would assume I was referring to Johann Sebastian...

In my last post I started by mentioning Australia's obsession with "big things" as tourist attractions. The idea that something big - in...

Australia is a big country and we seem to be obsessed with big things. Locations around the nation aim to attract visitors with their own...

This music [listen] is by one of the best-known of all English composers, Henry Purcell. It's unthinkable to consider English music of...

This music [listen] is the final song in Winterreise - Winter Journey - a song cycle composed by Franz Schubert in 1827. Winterreise is...

One of the earliest Keys To Music programs (number 22, in fact, which went to air in June, 2003) was called "Who's Afraid of...

A while back I came to the realisation that I often forget Bartók. I was brought up to think of the history of 20th century music as...

Part One: 1732-1766 At the eastern end of modern-day Austria, very close to the border with Slovakia, is the village of Rohrau. 45 km...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is so central to western musical culture that it's easy to forget how important he is and how unique he was. Like...

Keys To Music often used anniversaries as a rationale for some of the topics I chose, and, to be honest, they were often an excuse for me...