1 writer, 2 violinists, 18 concerts, 21 days, 49 years ago
There’s this thing about the music world: it is unbelievably small. Even with what feels like 100 concerts happening every week – maybe every day, at least in “normal” times – you can still find performers who seem to have played in 99 of them. You might run into people you saw just last week, […]
Where were you on 9/11?
Few of us will ever forget what we were doing when we heard the news that two passenger planes had crashed into the Twin Towers in New York…
Spare a thought for Hazel Thornton
So far so good: I’ve reached the middle of my book about the LCO, complete with the swinging sixties and suspect seventies. I’ve had to kill off our first hero, Anthony Bernard, the founder-prequel to that present-day orchestral Luke Skywalker, Christopher Warren-Green. Between their two sizeable reigns, there’s a period of almost-no-man’s-land we could call […]
The lion, the writer and the wardrobe…
Emergency wire from resident writer STOP Trapped in 1920s STOP Quarter through book STOP Only another 93 years to go STOP. This is the trouble with blithely setting off down the back of the wardrobe into the land of the distant past. You find stuff. And then you find more stuff. And the more you […]
A new book for the LCO
Like most of the best projects, it all began with a phone call. “Hello, it’s the London Chamber Orchestra here. Would you write us a book for our centenary?” Only one snag, it turned out: the centenary is this year. So if you think I’ve got my work cut out, you’re not wrong. An orchestra’s centenary […]
