Ligeti's Piano Études are famously quixotic in pushing the player beyond their usual limits.

Fast, funny and furious, Gerald Barry's adaptation of 'a trivial comedy for serious people' merits a full staging

In 1819, Anton Diabelli invited 50 composers to contribute a variation to a composite volume that was to be a snapshot of Viennese musical life.

Schubert’s last three sonatas, like Beethoven’s final three, make a massive valedictory statement, but in a very different way.

Music helped those enduring the horrors of the Second World War, says Patrick Bade in a new book

A showcase for three young conductors, a malfunction at the printers, and for the first time in my experience no programmes for the audience and the prospect of blind-tasting their talents.

Is the Royal Albert Hall big enough to contain Lang Lang’s gigantic ego?

David Zinman's Mahler and Beethoven cycles with the Tonhalle exemplify the "third way" in historically informed performance practice.

Evgeny Kissin likes to disconcert people, and at this Barbican recital he nipped onstage and started to play before the audience had registered he’d even arrived.

The unorthodox pairing of Berg's anguished memorial to Manon Gropius and Beethoven's earthy, ecstatic concerto casts a curious spell in this thoughtful performance from Isabelle Faust and Orchestra Mozart under Claudio Abbado.

The American pianist Richard Goode doesn’t give many recitals, but his uniquely personal vision ensures that each one is special.

The hotel on the other side of Lake Geneva cashed in on the delicious shamelessness of it. They hired out binoculars so that tourists could gawp pruriently at the Villa Diodati and its scandalous summer menage of the Shelleys; the "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" Byron, and Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley's half-sister, who had slept with both poets and was carrying Byron's baby. 

Schubertiads were what Franz Schubert’s friends called the soirees at which he played his works on the piano, and by all accounts they were joyous occasions.