Ivan Hewett

Sometimes the seed of a creative endeavour has to lie fallow for years or even decades before it finally germinates and bears fruit. That was certainly the case for Matthew Barley, cellist, improviser and now also composer. His new work Light Stories, which is released on CD and goes on live tour this month sprang from a traumatic incident more than forty years ago, when as a boy of 16 he was hanging out with some friends doing drugs, and things got out of hand.

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A year ago, a global outcry earned the group a stay of execution, though has it come at an unacceptable price?

If it's true that Shakespeare is one of our gifts to the world, we can't be possessive about him.

Hearing a Moog synthesizer is like walking into a pub that has miraculously survived intact from the 1970s.

The closure and shrinking of music departments at UK universities in recent years has become an alarming and accelerating trend.

In Search of Beethoven records the journalist’s charmingly nerdy attempt to visit every bakery and theatre associated with the composer

Arnold Scoenberg’s music can be madly excessive and thorny but this wonderful concert revealed its beauty and titanic force

The two most in-demand classical pianists in the world came together for a spellbinding concert at the Royal Festival Hall

There was a time when BBC Radio 3 's mission was to bring the widest variety of classical music to the widest possible public, with knowledgeable and enthusiastic presenters who knew how to wear their learning lightly.