brisbane hate

Very excited to be heading tomorrow to Great Malvern to do a pre-concert talk about the Schumann Violin Concerto with conductor Ken Woods – whose concert with the English Symphony Orchestra includes this haunting work as centrepiece, with soloist Zoe Beyers. We are at Great Malvern Priory, talk at 6.30pm, concert at 7.30pm. Booking here. Incidentally, I will also be presenting a concert themed around Jelly d'Arányi, World War I and World War II for the  Oxford Philharmonic on 1 June , including the concerto alongside music by Bartók and FS Kelly. As a preview, here is an article I wrote for the Independent in 2016 about the extraordinary history of this long-forgotten work, its traumatic composition when Schumann was on the cusp of mental illness and its bizarre rediscovery in the 1930s when the world itself was tipping over into madness...  Robert Schumann Photo from Wikimedia When I first heard the story of how Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto came to light in the 1930s, I ...

I’ve just had a terrific Skype chat with the young Russian violinist  Alena Baeva , ahead of her London debut at the Royal Festival Hall on Wednesday. She and I have a little Schumann-related project together in June in Oxford and it’s splendid to get to know her. Here she is, talking about her turbulent background in central Asia, her first-rate musical training, her passion for historical recordings and all we can learn from them, and a few particularly wonderful concertos… JD: Alena, you’ve recently been playing a very special piece in Katowice to mark 100 years of Polish independence…  AB: It was a major event for me because I’d wanted to play the Karlowicz Concerto for a long time. It’s hardly played anywhere but Poland, which is a pity because it’s a great piece. It’s quite difficult! Someone brought it for me to play in a masterclass in Poland and I was fascinated. I’m happy we did it this summer.  JD: Where are you from and where did you grow up?  AB: That’s ...