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Where do you sit to play the piano?

Well, in front of the keyboard, of course. Ah, but where? Well, mostly in the centre, which (on a piano with 88 keys) is not middle-C, but middle-E. We sit there because it's where the body is best...

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Alan Bennett's Benjamin Britten: an uptight pansy with a voice like Brian Sewell

Musicians by and large tend not to make good drama, probably because their lives are almost always (with a few exceptions: Schumann, Gesualdo…) tightly focused on their art and otherwise withdrawn from...

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The hotel where Britten and Pears consummated their relationship

I am in Grand Rapids this week and, over dinner with the conductor David Lockington earlier, I was amazed to discover that it was in this town that the most famous gay musical couple of the 20th...

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Why is music so resistant to crossing borders?

I attended an interesting concert last night in Poole, given by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Hill. The concept of their "living tradition" series is taken up in three concerts...

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ENO's shocking new paedophile Midsummer Night's Dream is brilliant, and I...

Poor Britten. Poor, poor Britten. The vicarious, armchair thrill of picking over evidence of his (no longer hidden) sexuality in the minutiae of his work goes ever on; and I've rarely seen a nastier,...

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Why Britten's Saint Nicolas had me reaching for a handkerchief in Smith Square

I don't regard myself as more than averagely sentimental and there isn't too much music that reduces me to tears. But a moment in Britten's St Nicolas does it with press-button certainty, when the...

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The extraordinary if arctic spectacle of Peter Grimes on Aldeburgh beach

Well it happened, more or less as planned. The wind blew dangerously close to gale force, shaking fragile-looking lighting towers and whipping noisily against the singers’ head-mikes. Several hundred...

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Remembering Lutoslawski… and his brush

If I were in charge of events to mark this year’s centenary of the Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski, I’d have spent the past twelve months watching what people in the UK were organising for the...

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