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Prokofiev's War and Peace

Sergei Prokofiev’s War and Peace (1953) was an adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel begun during WWII. He saw it as a personal interpretation of the novel.

The Cockney Romantics: John Keats and his Friends

Jonathan Bate will track Keats to Hampstead and tell of the extraordinary circle of writers – opium-eater Thomas De Quincey, essayist Charles Lamb, master-critic William Hazlitt – who wrote for The London Magazine, until its gifted editor was killed in a duel with a rival critic.

The Unacclaimed Accompanist

Graham Johnson examines a problematic profession that continues to attract many gifted young pianists to its ranks and asks why.

London Belongs to Us: Street-Life and New Wave British Cinema of the 1960s

In the 1960s, British filmmakers broke out of the studio to find new subjects among the young, fashionable and disadvantaged, seen in their natural habitats – not only in the North and Midlands, but in unfamiliar parts of London.

Deep Listening: Quiet Music and Quieter Audiences

As music gets quiet, so too must listening. But what do the contexts and ideologies of quiet music and quieter listening mean?

The Greatest Speech of all Time: Pericles' Funeral Oration

In 431 BCE the Athenian statesman Pericles delivered one of the most influential speeches of all time, his Epitaphios or Funeral Oration. The occasion was at the funeral of the first Athenian soldiers to lose their lives in the Peloponnesian War.

Music Made of Listening: John Cage and 4'33"

Musicians make sounds - that much, you’d have thought, is obvious! Yet more than the sounds they make, it’s the choices that musicians are making about how and when to play that really matter - choices that are made through listening.