Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Thelonious Monk... these names are synonymous with the great Jazz Age. But how many people know Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff, to whom we owe the recorded memory of our Jazz legends? Two German…

Multi award-winning Northern Ballet are the UK’s première narrative ballet company whose work pushes the boundaries of what stories can be told through dance. They inspire new and diverse audiences to engage with the artform through their unique…

A television film about a single work, Modest Mussorgski’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”. Written as a tribute to a lost friend, Victor Alexandrovich Hartmann, it is a strange and moving masterpiece which has become Mussorgski’s most popular work. It…

1970 was the 200th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth and, to mark the occasion, Daniel Barenboim and Christopher Nupen collaborated on a thirteen-part series about the man and his music. Close friends at the time, Barenboim as artist and…

A film about the pioneering career of Christopher Nupen, who founded one of the first independent production companies in the 1960s, at the dawn of the music documentary era. Seizing upon the emerging camera technology and his unique access to a…

The choir and the orchestra of the Bach Collegium Japan - shooting-star among the celebrated baroque specialists -perform the St John's Passion with only a small ensemble of about 50 musicians (as was custom at the time) under the former Ton Koopman…

The Great Mass is the spiritual keystone of a choreographic undertaking in which Uwe Scholz absorbs the structure of the liturgy of the mass. He adds to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's unfinished Great Mass in C minor other works by the same composer, such…

In retrospect, the solo version of Strawinsky’s Sacre du Printemps can be interpreted as a bleak, oppressive dance about his own life. The ballet is one of the late works by Uwe Scholz, one of the most important choreographers of the twentieth…

“Swan Lake” by Peter I. Tchaikovsky is the most famous ballet of all time. Since its world premiere in 1877 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow there have been countless interpretations of this romantic dance fairy tale. The epitome of these remains…

El Sistema is a network of children’s and youth orchestras, music centres and workshops in Venezuela, in which more than 250,000 children and young people are currently learning to play an instrument. It was set up over thirty years ago by José…