Rachmaninov: Romances – review
Dmitri Hvorostovsky (baritone), Ivari Ilja (piano)(Ondine)This recording should come with the warning "too hot to handle", such is the combustible combination of Dmitri Hvorostovsky's heroic baritone with the flaming passion of intensely romantic Russi...
The Train in the Night by Nick Coleman – review
A music journalist's memoir of encroaching deafnessNick Coleman has found and made his life in music. His father had a keen amateur interest; much of his East Anglian childhood was spent in thrall to successive waves of pop, rock, punk, reggae, and so ...
‘A life crammed with many separate talents’: Len Deighton remembers Ted Dicks
Tucked away behind the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, there is a row of hidden studios. During the second world war they were used by the Special Operations Executive to train agents who were about to be dropped into German-occupied Europe. Late...
The Train in the Night by Nick Coleman
A veteran music writer tells how he reconnected with the soundtrack of his life after suffering sudden hearing lossWhat is the opposite of music? Before reading Nick Coleman's affecting memoir, my temptation might have been to suggest unthinkingly that...
You Are Not Alone by Jermaine Jackson
What was the singer really like? Michael Jackson's brother tells the taleMichael Jackson went to his grave pop's greatest enigma. He was arguably the most famous man in the world, but his own world seemed so utterly alien – the theme-park mansion, th...
Joe Potts obituary
My father, Joe Potts, who has died of a heart attack aged 70, was a novelist, singer-songwriter and spiritual healer. His first novel, Growing Sideways (1968), was the picaresque tale of an irresponsible teenage drifter's blackly comic and erotic misad...
Audiences flock to ‘difficult’ contemporary classical music
The Southbank, Barbican, ENO and BBC4 are catering for the new-found appetite for sonic adventureWhen Swiss conductor Baldur Brönnimann was a student 25 years ago, "if you had more than 30 people at a concert it was a failure because it was popul...
Dream Hunter: from folktale to opera
A poet explains how the tradition of dreams inspired him to pen a librettoWhen the composer Nicola LeFanu came to me with the proposal that we write a short opera, I was ready. After collaborating on a dramatic monologue, Alkman, and some love-lyrics, ...
Dream Hunter: from folktale to opera
A poet explains how the tradition of dreams inspired him to pen a librettoWhen the composer Nicola LeFanu came to me with the proposal that we write a short opera, I was ready. After collaborating on a dramatic monologue, Alkman, and some love-lyrics, ...
Kim Dotcom’s brash jetset image ‘hid sharp business mind’
File-sharing millionaire refused bail in New Zealand could motivate others into doing what he wanted, claim associatesHe lived a life dominated by fast cars, holidays on $10m super-yachts and an obsession with shoot 'em up computer games. But on Wednes...
Saturn calling: the sounds of Leyland James Kirby
WG Sebald's sprawling novel The Rings of Saturn has inspired a movie. The composer of its soundtrack tells Ben Beaumont-Thomas why only mashed-up Schubert would do"The book is very ghost-like," says Leyland James Kirby. "So the music is ghost-like too....
Megaupload investigation: Kim Dotcom denied bail
File-sharing multimillionaire faces four more weeks in jail in New Zealand after judge warns he could try to flee to GermanyThe file-sharing multimillionaire, Kim Dotcom, is facing a further four weeks in custody after a judge in in New Zealand denied ...
