How ironic that Handel, the greatest opera composer of the early 18th century, should have so decisively abandoned the artform which had...

In late 1745 Handel, aged 60, had another bout of what appears to have been some sort of mental illness. Reports exist of him being...

When we left Handel in Part Three, we were in mid-1743. He had premiered Samson and given Messiah for the first time in London. He'd had...

By early 1739 Handel's London audiences must have wondered what on earth he was up to. Here was the nation's leading composer of Italian...

For Handelians, certain dates stick in the mind: 1685: Handel's birth; 1710: Handel arrives in London for the first time; 1727: Handel is...

During my later years with the ABC I had the privilege of indulging my passion for the life and work of Handel on a number of occasions....

Part One One of the facts of music history which many of us probably remember is the fact that Johann Sebastian Bach's music fell into...

In the summer of 1906, Gustav Mahler composed his massive eighth symphony, a vast musical canvas requiring hundreds of singers and...

Perhaps the most famous musical family in the history of western music is the Bach family. There were musical Bachs (I've counted 77) all...

Part One This music was written by a man who was 81. It was written in depressing, shattering circumstances at the end of the second...

This music [listen] was written in 1953 by the English composer Sir Michael Tippett in response to a commission from the Edinburgh...

In modern musical parlance, the word "cycle" is used to denote a complete batch of something. So even though he didn't describe the Ring...

The two radio programs on which the following article is based went to air in November 2013 to mark the centenary of Britten's birth. It...

In our last two posts we've been charting the history of the piano trio. In the first instalment we explored the piano trio's origins in...

At the start of the 19th century, chamber music was still regarded as something of a domestic form of music making. Chamber music did...

I don't spend anywhere near enough time listening to (or writing about) chamber music. It's been many decades now since I was skilled...

I think it’d be fair to say that with one exception, the eight works I’m going to survey in this post document a rather sad tale: the...

It seems almost indecent to suggest that opera could be a battleground between vested interests but in early 18th century London this is...

This post is the second in a series of four covering the rich legacy of George Frideric Handel's London operas, and we begin with the...

During my later years with the ABC I had the privilege of indulging my passion for the life and work of Handel on a number of occasions....