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Dame Emma Kirkby - a big birthday to sing for I was very lucky to record this podcast interview with Dame Emma Kirkby at the Wigmore. The much-loved British soprano, doyenne of "early music", is giving a special 70th Birthday concert tomorrow with a super roster of guest artists. Happy birthday, Dame Emma, and have a wonderful time! Meanwhile, here's the podcast from the Wigmore Hall site. And, of course, some music - what better than Mozart's 'Exsultate, jubilate'?

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Above, conductor Monica Buckland gives a TED talk about the whole point of conducting, from the basics to the fingertips, and what we can all learn from the process even if we're not actual musicians. Translating physical gestures into music, and drawing out the music that's within us all, in real life as much as on the concert platform. This is conducting as empowerment. Enjoy!

Sometimes surprising things crop up when you're writing programme notes. Catch the amazing Marc-André Hamelin on 10 March at the Wigmore Hall in a programme of...Schumann, Chopin, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Fauré and six transcriptions of Charles Trenet songs made by a mysterious piano-playing 'Mr Nobody' in the 1950s - an era in which playing popular music was so frowned upon that the pianist-transcriber elected not to reveal that his name was actually Alexis Weissenberg. Hamelin heard the Mr Nobody recording and, not knowing if the arrangement had ever been written down, transcribed it all himself from the audio. He recorded it on a Hyperion CD called 'In a State of Jazz'. Much later, Weissenberg's daughter sent him some scans of the original manuscript, but it didn't always match the recording. Now both versions have been published together. You'll need to come to the Wigmore Hall on 10 March to read the rest and hear Hamelin in action. Meanwhile, enjoy a ...

I've been reading an interesting book, which I'm reviewing for BBC Music Magazine. It's Good Music: What It Is and Who Gets to Decide , by the American academic John J Sheinbaum . Among many things it does is to articulate a shake-up in the deep-seated ways we tend to think about the music we listen to. Is the idea of "greatness" all-encompassing in our musical judgments? If so, why? Does it have to be? Do we listen to music because it is empirically "great" in some way - or because we think it is because others have judged it to be? And not to other things because they are...not? It's a chewy, academic read, but deep within the texts and analyses are some intriguing ideas and a good few home truths. It's got me thinking... Good Music WHAT IT IS AND WHO GETS TO DECIDE 69 JOHN J. SHEINBAUM 320 pages | 2 halftones, 25 musical examples, 8 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2019 Over the past two centuries Western culture has largely valorized a particular kind of “...

It is Lithuania's National Day today, and for the first time Symphony Hall, Birmingham, is to resound to  The Sea by Mikolajus Čiurlionis , the CBSO conducted by Mirga Gražynitė-Tyla, with live-painted visual interpretations by Norman Perryman (see his recent guest post here ). I'm going up to hear it.  As Norman mentioned the other day, I have Lithuanian roots, or sort of. My ancestors were from a small town now called Skudas, where they lived for several centuries until pogroms in the late 19th century persuaded them to seek a new life on the other side of the world, when they fetched up in South Africa. I visited Lithuania for the first time 15 years ago, in 2004, when the violinist Philippe Graffin suggested I could come out to Vilnius to cover a world premiere that he and the violist Nobuko Imai were giving, of Vytautas Barkauskas's Duo Concertante, and do a spot of roots-finding while I was about it. This seemed like a good idea, especially as there was a heap of int...

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