From discord to harmony, a composer’s life is never dull, writes the Pulitzer Prize-winning John Adams.

NEW YORK — Most people would mark Shenyang’s career trajectory from the moment he won the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition in 2007, putting him in the company of former winners Bryn Terfel and Dmitri Hvorostovsky. But the Chinese-born bass-baritone, now 27, cites the turning point from several weeks before, during a master class by Renée Fleming at the Shanghai Conservatory.

COMPOSING, says Thomas Ades in a friend’s New York loft, is “essentially a weird, physical compulsion you do on your own. You just have to do it. It’s almost pathological. If I didn’t I would become impossible, unmanageable, a gibbering wreck wandering the streets muttering wildly. It’s like getting rid of a nervous twitch. I can’t live in this world unless I’m creating music.”

The 92-year-old pianist worked with Ho Chi Minh and other musicians to bring classic Western music to the country and keep its conservatory going through war and beyond. The Vietnam National Academy of Music also teaches traditional Vietnamese music.

From the time he picked up a toy guitar and a chopstick, Ray Chen was destined to become an ‘ear opener’, writes Catherine Keenan.

Former Sony president Norio Ohga, who helped transform the music industry with the development of the compact disc format, has died at the age of 81, the company said.

As he is feted with a lifetime achievement award, the peerless concert pianist Alfred Brendel reflects on life two years after retirement – the pleasures of art, going to concerts, the sonatas he still plays at home… and the particular joy of C minor.

Emigrating from the Soviet Union to the West in January 1980 with his wife, Nora, and their two small sons, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt was stopped by border police at the Brest railroad station for a luggage search. “We had only seven suitcases, full of my scores, records and tapes,” he recalled recently. “They said, ‘Let’s listen.’ It was a big station. No one else was there.