Classical music
The Spectator’s Notes
When I interviewed Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former president of France, for my biography of Margaret Thatcher, I asked him…
A writer’s notebook
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the Master of the Queen’s Music, recently wrote about the almost total ignorance of young people…
Nationalist stirrings
Philip Hensher on how an impassioned, chaotic group of amateur 19th-century composers created the first distinctively Russian music
Conduct becoming
Michael Henderson talks to the youthful conductor Daniel Harding, who realises that the older he gets the more he has to learn
Singing under cardboard
To undertake a concert tour of New Zealand’s cathedrals at the moment is to be constantly reminded of the destructive…
