A couple of years ago, soprano Rebecca Lea asked me if I had any unrecorded songs about winter, for a new disc she was thinking about.  It so happened that I did: this was a tiny haiku collection, On White Meadows , extracted from the text of Die Wintereisse. I pinged the score over to her and thought not much more about it.   Two years later: the now double album of 21 songs by a huge range of contemporary composers, and a print songbook of all the music (most of it new, a

A Happy New Year to my website readers, and my thanks as ever for your visit here. Appropriately (and amazingly to me) this happens to be the 600th post I've put up on my site since it was set up in 2014. I'm posting somewhat less frequently these days, but I'll continue to signpost interesting events coming up, and report on unusual visits here and there.   In the next few months, the orchestral headline in my diary ( March 13th, Barbican ) is a performance of The Welcome Ar

I received this magnificent bouquet at yesterday's AGM of the Royal Society of Musicians , stepping down after ten years as the Society's President. It really has been a pleasure to fulfil this largely ceremonial post, but also a great honour. RSM was founded in 1738 by George Frideric Handel and colleagues in response to cases of poverty resulting from ill health amongst fellow musicians. Generations of musicians have taken up the baton, and the Society is now particularly w