As it’s nearly Christmas, you’ll forgive me if I jettison my normal dry academic precision for a little bit of end of term amusement. I am pleased to report that the LSC were staying in a different hotel from the orchestra in a another part of Paris which rendered my...
Pairing up the four symphonies of Szymanowski and Brahms has provoked some discussion within the band and the press. Why put these two composers together? Does the performance of the two composers bring anything to the other, is there some illumination provided by hearing the...
If an alien life form were to land unannounced backstage at a concert in 2012, they would make some basic assumptions about human behaviour which I once would have thought unfounded. Now I'm not so sure. One of the many changes I have seen in my time on the world touring...
I am at the moment sitting in a...
As an encore at the recital the other night, we played a little melancholy Welsh folk song. Simple but effective in its main aim of bringing a lump to the throat and a tear to the eye. A member of the audience asked me at the reception afterwards if all Welsh folk songs were...
Project Manager Craig Thorne gives us a progress update... I certainly can't take all the credit for Plan C - I must mention everyone in the Discovery team who pulled together to make it happen: Paul, Elie, Becca and Laura who spent many hours on hold and online with just about...
I don't know what the French for joie de vivre is, but I left mine somewhere on the Barbican stage on Thursday night after Daphnis and Chloe. Well, really it was after a week which began 2 weeks earlier which had 2 performances of Daphnis, La Mer and a couple of concerti as...
After C.S. lewis decorated my back garden last week, Paris seems rather drab. We arrived yesterday to a grey and miserable city, cloaked in a wet blanket of cloud; despite the travel nightmare which was last week in London, I began to long for the crunchy snow again. Still we...
Although I am in Basingstoke today, I shall not be filling you in on backstage gossip as it isn't really a tour. However we travel to Paris on Monday with Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Visit the site for regular blogs. If you are suffering from blog addiction then you might be...
