For those of you who don't know him, one of the greatest singers of the canzona napulitana. Murolo's voice, so utterly unaffected yet...

I've been re-reading Sir Gawain over the past week. A flawed little man gallivants across (modern-day) Wales and northern England to keep...

More exciting than visiting somewhere new, is visiting it in the footsteps of someone whose work you admire. Just before leaving for...

Now is this golden crown like a deep well That owes two buckets, filling one another, The emptier ever dancing in the air, The other...

74 years ago today we lost the exceptionally gifted Romanian pianist Dinu Lipatti. For those of you who don't know him, Lipatti's playing...

When translating poetry, notes the scholar AK Ramanujan, you must recreate not so much the literal sense of the original, as the effect...

Two superb recordings of the Liszt classic. Cziffra's is all about that glorious high melody- some of the best cantabile playing I've...

Today marks 175 years since the death of Fryderyk Chopin. A good opportunity to remember that at twenty-one, the composer wrote one of...

Just a quick post to celebrate what would have been the 98th birthday of the great German keyboardist Karl Richter, the man who changed...

I was watching, last week, a lovely video of Horowitz performing a Bach transcription. Lovely not only because of the playing, but...

There's really very little I can say about Gould which has not already been exhausted, so I'm going to let this snippet from Bach Partita...

No more magnificent way to open a blog post than with the roof of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. Here Apollo presents Italy's...

Today marks the 125th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges- one of my most important literary influences growing up. It wasn't his weird and...

Word of the week: the Anglo-Saxon adjective ælf-scīne, 'elf-bright,' or beautiful. I spent an exhilarating evening listening to the...

Reading an old paper by Leigh Henry on Celtic music, I came across a wonderful anecdote worth reading in full (I do miss the days when...

' It is far easier to be sensible in cities than in many country places I could tell you of,' observes Yeats in The Celtic Twilight....

Today marks 107 years since the death of the British poet and writer Edward Thomas, one of the most simply, honestly lyrical voices of...

I always go back to a line from Purgatorio whose effect, I think, was much elevated through a stroke of inspiration from the translator...

From Irish Fairytales, by James Stephens. A young boy, Fionn, finds the poet Finegas fishing by the river, and upon enquiring why, they...

Today marks 85 years since the passing of WB Yeats, who first introduced me to the heartstopping beauty of Irish myth, and is one of a...