Imagine you’re meeting a group of friends for a run. You’ve just gathered in the park and are so much looking forward to having fun together. But a second before you start, the sun disappears and everything is a couple of shades darker, so although it’s the middle of the day, you have trouble seeing where you’re going. You decide…

I don’t know if it was boredom or the wish to avoid writing the umptieth essay that led me to take a quiz on Classic FM with the catchy title ‘Can we guess your NAME from your musical taste?’ (http://www.classicfm.com/lifestyle/quizzes/guess-your-name/). And after choosing Johann Strauss II as my musical soulmate, after revealing that if I had to choose one composer…

So, there I am, 34 years of age, and because I’ve got absolutely nothing better to do, somebody has decided I should be doing another internship. And while I long ago made a habit of ignoring people who think that they can freely dispose of my precious time here on earth, in this case I am not quite able to…

Let’s start with the problem: These days, musicians seem to be the butt end of an airline joke that nobody really finds funny. Not a single month goes by in which I don’t see pictures of some shredded instrument online, hear a horror story of a musician friend harassed by airline personnel or stand at the gate myself asking for…

I have never been able to fully grasp the idea behind historically informed performance. For a start, why would anyone want to play on period instruments? Instruments are hard enough to master as it is, so if a player makes his/her life more difficult by playing on a version of an instrument that went out of fashion FOR A REASON,…

I have never been able to fully grasp the idea behind historically informed performance. For a start, why would anyone want to play on period instruments? Instruments are hard enough to master as it is, so if a player makes his/her life more difficult by playing on a version of an instrument that went out of fashion FOR A REASON,…