If ever there was a piece of music which needed little or no introduction, just mention Ravel’s Bolero. Composed in 1928, it’s one of...

In Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries the middle class emerged as a major social stratum in its own right. This large...

It's a sad reality that a person's achievements, even their greatness, can be overshadowed by a single event which serves to blot out so...

This music is a minuet, a movement from one of Haydn's symphonies. The elegant minuet was the most popular and pervasive courtly dance of...

This cheery music comes from the pen of a composer who is most definitely not part of the mainstream of music heard in concerts nowadays....

It's interesting how a new century can make things happen. The start of the 19th century is a case in point. In 1801 Mozart was dead,...

The European discovery of the New World in 1492 changed the world for ever. More than five centuries later the impact of that discovery...

Not long ago I devoted a post to the life and work of Sir Arthur Sullivan. Sullivan is of course remembered today mainly for his...

It will come as no surprise to those who know me that I'm somewhat obsessed with the history of the arts in general, and of music in...

In November 2008 I presented a series of three Keys To Music programs on ABC Classic FM (now ABC Classic) covering one of the “Everests”...

This is one of those “bird’s eye view” surveys. What I’d like to do is to give you an overview of a part - a rather large part - of the...

In 1875 the composer Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky was living in Moscow and he received what was for him an unusual commission, a request to...

Today we’re going to take a journey through a range of widely-differing church music spanning several centuries. All the extracts we’ll...

There’s no doubting that in the form of music known as Lieder - German-language art song - the name of Franz Schubert reigns supreme. In...

The impact of cinema on our lives in the past 120 years or so is quite amazing. From its beginnings as an offshoot of vaudeville, where...

In some respects the composer Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) needs no introduction. His more than 400 concertos are fertile ground for...

The English composer Gustav Holst was born in 1874. He was a prolific composer, a visionary, inspired by influences as diverse as English...

In classical music, we concern ourselves with a truly vast amount of art. It’s easy for some pockets of the repertoire to be ignored...

In 1791 the most famous composer in Europe, Joseph Haydn, made his first trip to England. He was 59 and had spent virtually all his...

In the second scene of the second act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet there’s a delicious scene which always brings a smile to my face because of...