The marvellous Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires was joined by Pierre Boulez and the Berlin Philharmonic for the European Concert 2003. Since 1991, when the Berlin Philharmonic gave their first European Concert, this annual musical summit in…

‘My Favourite Opera – Katia Ricciarelli’, which will be released in May 2013, portraits the Italian star soprano Katia Ricciarelli. Katia Ricciarelli is best known for her roles in Rossini, Verdi and Puccini Operas but also appeared as Desdemona in…

World famous bass-baritone Ruggero Raimondi prepares for a staging of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni at Bolgogna’s historic Teatro Comunale, working alongside conductor Riccardo Chailly and stage director Luca Ronconi as well as a distinguished cast of…

We live in a “renaissance of the piano”, as the New York Times so surprisingly put it in summer 2005. A new generation is reviving the piano’s popularity as pianists with a passion for virtuosity and a willingness to expand their repertoire take to…

Maestro Abbado left us with an inspiring bestowal when the Berlin Philharmonics and himself made an appearance at the Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Japan, in October 1994 Claudio Abbado’s Japan tour is seen as one the highlights of his musical career and…

LEGATO is a DVD series dedicated to presenting some of the most fascinating of today’s younger generation pianists - their development, their ideas and, of course, their music. Each DVD in this series presents an artist and explores an aspect of the…

150 musicians from Cuba, Norway, Poland, Britain, Syria, Germany, Bulgaria and the USA to contribute their "spirits of music" to an unusual concert event uniting classical and world music Bobby McFerrin stands like no other for the reconciliation of…

A dim light picks out the outlines of the hall. Suddenly a massive shadow appears and moves swiftly over to the keyboard. There follows the vaguest of unsmiling acknowledgements in the general direction of the audience, and then the music begins…

Alfred Brendel is arguably the most outstanding modern exponent of Schubert's piano music currently before the public. He is capable of bringing not only the verve of this music but also its poetic intensity and intellectual depth to life with a…

Verdi first presented his Messa da Requiem in the Church of San Marco. It was his emotional response to the death of the Italian national poet Alessandro Manzoni. He poured his entire dramatic skill, the fruit of thirty years of theatrical work, into…