There's an interesting parallel between King Lear and the story of the Indian demon king Prahrada (or Prahlada), in that I always took...

A longer blog post is coming shortly, but for now I just wish to mark the 121st birthday of the criminally underrated Hungarian-American...

Reading Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus I came across the lines: 'Music, too, keeps building anew with the insecurest stones her celestial...

Once in a while, you hear a recording which seems to reduce all other interpretations to homogeneous mush. And once in an even longer...

Reading the Aeneid this week I came across the wonderful passage in which Aeneas, landing in Carthage, comes across murals of the Trojan...

French Renaissance songs are very fond of farewells, and these two examples- Josquin's Mille Regretz and Dufay's Adieu, ces bons vins-...

'Then a change began slowly to declare itself. The horizon became clearer, field and tree came more into sight, and somehow with a...

Travelling across Lake Como last weekend, the ferry stopped at the village of Torno. Between the houses ran narrow little paths with...

Certain images conjured up by poets stay with you for a lifetime. Borges, in a wonderful essay, quite rightly singles out as 'perfectly...

Vitaly Morgulis's criminally underrated Op 10 no 2 recording can languish no longer in the recesses of YouTube. The voicing was so...

I hate to choose a melancholy piece for the occasion, but Schumann's first Dawn Song is a thing of too achingly unique beauty, a...

It's always a pleasure to find one of those recordings which makes you go "This piece can sound like that?' Vladimir de Pachmann's...

In Italo Calvino's famous work Invisible Cities, Marco Polo, a native Venetian, describes to the Chinese emperor the various cities he...

Today marks 30 years since Tom Stoppard's dazzling play Arcadia opened at the National Theatre. Praise and analysis of the work's...

'‘Who keeps his mind of childhood, keeps his mind,' writes Antonio Porchia. If any writer did, it's Beverly Cleary, who would have turned...

No better occasion than Rachmaninov's 150th birthday to celebrate some fine recordings of his works. The last two have been mentioned in...

Yeats, and a single but breathtaking fragment from the poet Herbert Trench, had set me hunting for good translations of Irish Gaelic myth...

Being a little pressed for time recently, I don't have time for a full-fledged post to mark Chopin's birthday (which fell last...

I recently discovered Janáček's In the Mists, one of the most hauntingly beguiling pieces I've heard since Chopin's first nocturne,...

Music: Sibelius 7. Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. 'And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you...