Paul Kildea

Haunted by Old Russia: Rachmaninoff’s lonely final years

27 May 2023 9:00 am

Exiled from Russia and often denigrated in America, Rachmaninoff lived in a fug of unbearable, impenetrable sadness, says Paul Kildea

Mozart the infant prodigy was also a child of the Enlightenment

19 December 2020 9:00 am

‘My dear young man: don’t take it too hard,’ Joseph II counsels a puppyish Mozart, the colour of his hair…

It’s time to leave Chopin in peace

22 August 2020 9:00 am

There’s a scene early on in A Song to Remember — Charles Vidor’s clunky Technicolor film of 1945 — in…

A grand romance: Sophy Roberts goes in search of lost Bechsteins in Siberia

7 February 2020 10:00 pm

In the world of classic cars, barn-finds sometimes do occur. An old Mercedes Gullwing might be discovered under tarps and…

Zuzana Ruzicková. Credit: Getty Images

Bach helped me survive Bergen-Belsen

25 May 2019 9:00 am

One of the great joys of the 18th-century novella La petite maison is the way Jean-François de Bastide matches the…

Handel is rowed in a gondola on the Thames, in an illustration for ‘The Water Music’

Handel’s greatest hits — the glorious London decades

15 September 2018 9:00 am

England has been home to three great composer-entrepreneurs since 1700: Benjamin Britten in the 20th century; Arthur Sullivan in the…