Nine cities in seven countries; all in all, eleven concerts, on top of that, an appearance at home in Munich. Celebrating its 500th anniversary, the Bayerisches Staatsorchester is currently on an extended journey. We have been looking forward with great anticipation to this tour during which we are aiming to present everything from our longstanding tradition that has stood the test of time and share it with a great number of music lovers throughout Europe.The Bayerisches Staatsorchester (Bavarian State Orchestra) can count itself lucky to be able to call the National Theatre in Munich home ( Read more ...

“Do you actually speak like that?” was the first thing a senior colleague said to me during my initial week at a prestigious UK opera house. I’ve always had a tricky time understanding who I really am.As a culture, we are obsessed with class. By fitting criteria, ordering ourselves, relating to a prescribed list, we find our place in the world, supposedly. I would hear people talking about it as a kid and think “what the hell does it all mean?”. Working, middle, upper middle, upper, new money, “oh they have cultural capital but not necessarily economic”. It all felt very confusing, but Read more ...

Circumstances matter here. The annual visit to what remains my favourite music festival in the world was going to be kyboshed by the date fixed for a big hospital operation. But the Pärnu Music Festival worked overtime to get me rebooked to the first slice of the 10 days, while my Macmillan nurse fixed up five crucial meetings and tests on the two days before my new departure date. I went, came back the evening before the 12-hour op and still can’t believe it all happened.That also shifted my usual expectations: I like to go for the big chamber concert featuring the world-class musicians of Read more ...

It is a complicated business running a summer school for 170 people in the British countryside. Not only laying on a stimulating programme of musical events, providing pastoral care for the under-18s and interval drinks for the over-18s, but more basic needs. As I arrived and was greeted by Voces8 Foundation CEO Paul Smith he was grappling with the news that a tree had come down on a nearby power line and there was likely to be no power to the site for 5 hours. This was a challenge both for the provision of lunch but also for the supply of electricity to the church so the organ could be used Read more ...

Sinead O’Connor, who has died aged 56, was, the world agrees, a brilliant, unstable, unique talent, a provocateur with an angelic voice. The Mirror’s front page yesterday was a moody black and white picture with the headline  “Nothing Compares…”. Morrissey was not the only one to point out the lack of support for her art for the last 30 years from mainstream companies and media. Now that she has passed she can safely be made a saintly legend. “In the middle ages, I would have been burnt as a witch” she told Peter Culshaw in their 2013 interview, republished below. The cover of The Mirror Read more ...

On December 8th 1957 there was a heavy snowstorm in New York. Ten elderly jazz musicians struggled to make their way through the drifts to a television studio on 10th Avenue. One of them – the bass player – collapsed in the street, and died in hospital three weeks later. But the others got through because they needed to be there, they wanted to be there to support Billie Holiday, who’d been their close friend and inspiration for more than 30 years.These legendary players had been assembled by producer Nat Hentoff, to create The Sound of Jazz for CBS Television: Ben Webster, Lester Young, Read more ...

“No one makes money from CDs anymore”; “Remember, once it’s out there it’s out there forever”; “Everyone’s making recordings these days, it’s a very cluttered market”; “You’ll struggle to make a mark…”These are just some of the things uttered to me when I first told people I was thinking of recording a new album. Are these statements untrue? Not entirely, but neither were they reasons enough to stop me from embarking on what has been an extraordinary voyage of self-discovery.The last few years have been a difficult time for musicians, but they also gave me a lot of space to ruminate. I Read more ...

The music of various African regions and cultures has played a significant role in shaping my own music. My exposure to African traditional music, which started not long after I began my own composition studies, helped me develop my unique artistic voice as a composer, and I owe this influence in part to my father and, indirectly, to his composition class in Hamburg.After graduating high school in 1983, I discovered a passion for music that I had never explored before. Despite never studying with my father, I did attend his composition class a few times over the years, including a final visit Read more ...

Recently, having just shared the rehearsal draft of my current Royal Court play Hope has a Happy Meal with two close friends, I found myself slightly offended when one of them said, "you can tell you were playing the Nintendo Switch obsessively when writing this." They then proceeded to talk about the play and its structure in video game terms. The plot of my play [favourably reviewed last week on theartsdesk] revolves around a woman called Hope returning to the People’s Republic of Coca Cola to find the family she left behind 24 years ago. As my friend (rightly) pointed out, the play Read more ...

My entire childhood was punctuated with music. I just can’t remember a time without it being present and I think it’s shaped me enormously. I have varying pieces of music for the different times in my life and they all evoke very powerful memories for me.As a child I used music as an escape: I had a very vivid imagination and listening to music was like entering a new world.  When I perform music now, I want to bring the audience into the world of that music. to feel and view the music in the same way that I do.  This affected the choice of repertoire on the album because it was Read more ...

Eight years ago I was privileged to be in Denmark on the 150th anniversary of Carl Nielsen’s birth, experiencing for the first time live his masterly Saul and David. The return visit was too brief and unexpectedly fraught, including a complicated return to Odense to see work in progress for a new Carl Nielsen Museum. Not a success, but redeemed by an impressive concert in a big series from the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and its fine chief conductor Fabio Luisi.The Odense leg was beset by problems. No trains heading from Copenhagen airport, so a twice-as-long taxi journey, and a return Read more ...

We at the Multi-Story Orchestra have been writing a new piece of music about social media. In one of the writing sessions I remember one of our musicians spending every second she wasn't playing on her phone, checking likes and comments as she'd released something that day. That feeling – being at the mercy of an unwinnable urge to be validated by other people's approval - is what our new piece is about.It was so cool hearing our young people's takes on it. They've grown up with social media in a way I can only imagine, and the original idea for a piece about social media was theirs. We wrote Read more ...