Three years on since the first lockdown, in-person musical activity has - with a few exceptions - more or less returned to the way it was pre-COVID.
For all the difficulties and tragedies of the period, one thing that did happen was a flourishing of musical creativity. Despite the restrictions and the challenges, people found creative to musically connect with one another during that strange time. Here we celebrate a few of them.
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Music history seen some of its best-loved figures die in the most unexpected ways. Here are eight of the oddest, bloodiest and sometimes tragically comic composers deaths we know of….
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What is it about French composers and the flute? There’s no shortage of music for the instrument ranging from the baroque to the present day, but if there’s a golden age in the flute’s long and varied history it’s unquestionably the period stretching from the end of the 19th century through to the mid 20th – and is tinged with an unmistakably French flavour. We’ve rounded up fourteen of our favourite pieces, from Borne to Boulez.
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We've all heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the most celebrated composers of all time. But could his sister have been just as good - or even better - if only she'd been given the same chances as her brother?
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We're all used to the cello as a beautiful melodic instrument - whether it's the gliding lyricism of Saint-Saëns's The Swan or the introspective warmth of Bach's Cello Suite No.1 but it can also be surprisingly percussive and rhythmic.
Here are three of our favorite examples of the cello being used as an instrument that's full of pluck!
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The biennial Cardiff Singer of the World competition has become a great springboard for those on the cusp of their professional careers.
Established in 1983, it is regarded as one of the most important operatic competitions in the world, reflected both in the stellar nature of the judging panel, which has included Sir Geraint Evans, Dame Joan Sutherland, Galina Vishnevskaya and Christoph Prégardien, and in some its iconic finalists.
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The 95th Academy Awards were announced in typically glitzy fashion on Sunday night.
Actors Brendan Fraser (in ‘The Whale’) Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeo (both in ‘Everything All at Once’) took home trophies for their acting, with’ Everything All at Once’ picking up best film and best director for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.
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Why is the tenor oboe called an “English horn”? Are violinists are really playing “little violas”? What links the bassoon and Benito Mussolini? And are viols really vile? The names of the major classical instruments are so familiar that we usually take them for granted, but digging into their origins reveals an intriguing hotchpotch of multicultural influences, from ancient Greece and Rome via medieval Europe through to the present day. Some names reveal surprisingly simple origins; others make no sense whatsoever but offer entertaining glimpses into language’s ability to mistranslate, mislead and sometimes downright mangle the original meaning of things.
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If you close your eyes and just listen to this acoustic fingerstyle guitar version of Michael Jackson's Rock With You - by young Japanese guitarist Kent Nishimura, you'll probably swear there are two or three people playing. There's a laid-back half-time beat, there are chords, there's melody, there's even a bit of a bass line.
So it's quite a shock when you realise there was no over-dubbing involved, this was all recorded live and performed by just one, very talented young man
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