When we think of Arles, we think of the paintings of Van Gogh: sun and fields and trees. In 1990, the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa made a set of short films, collectively entitled Dreams. One of the dreams, Crows,

Austrian composer and pianist Joseph Marx (1882-1964) started his life under his mother’s piano, listening while she practiced. When she noticed his own musical gifts, she sent him off to music school and he developed his pianistic skills. His talents

Spanish composer Alfonso Romero Asenjo (b. 1957) has been called a ‘trans-avant-garde’ composer: ‘it is neither here in the vanguard nor beyond it, but it takes it into account, knows it, values it, uses it eventually if it needs it

The Cyclades islands in Greece are a set of islands that encircle the main island of Delos. They are known in the art world for their flat-faces sculptures from the late Neolithic period. Between 3000 and 2000 BC these islands

‘Stately plump Buck Mulligan,’ walking down through the beginning of James Joyce’s phenomenal Ulysses, marked the start of one of the most important works of modernist literature. Chronicling a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, on 16 June 1904,

How context can change everything – when we listen to Francisco Tárrega’s 1905 work Gran vals, we hear an elegant guitar waltz…until we get to measure 13. Francisco Tárrega: Gran vals (Mats Bergström, guitar) Ah, the Nokia ringtone. The bane

In the late 20th century, Bernstein’s Overture to his opera Candide was the most performed piece of contemporary classical music, or so the secretary at ASCAP told me in the 1980s when I was sent to go pick up the

Lebanese composer Bechara El-Khoury (b. 1957- ) studied in Lebanon before continuing musical studies in Paris at the École Normale de Musique de Paris “Alfred Cortot” in 1979. A 1983 broadcast celebrating the centenary of the Lebanese-American writer and philosopher