It wasn’t planned, but there can hardly be a more appropriate work to remember the 75th anniversary of ‘Kristallnacht’ (in German: ‘Pogromnacht’), than Mahler’s IX symphony. I’m recording it at the moment in… Continue reading →

This is a fascinating youtube mini-documentary about the Galimir Quartet. A lengthier, fascinating documentary in French was put together by George Zeisel of ProQuartet, a French organisation that promotes chamber music (sadly not… Continue reading →

The latest quarterly Hanns Eisler newsletter deals with the thorny question of exactly how ‘Stalinist’ Eisler was. The day-to-day confrontations with the murderous Stalin regime were never met with any overt condemnation. Eisler… Continue reading →

Putting micro-details onto a macro-historic trajectory is no easy task. It’s easy to sink beneath a tsunami of minutia. Yet offering an accurate account of what people on all sides of the conflict… Continue reading →

With the end of the month, we approach an important, but under-reported event in history: 70 years since the Moscow Declaration signed on October 30th, 1943. Though the three powers of Great Britain,… Continue reading →

The Symposium noted elsewhere on this page called ‘Im Anschluss’ has now concluded. I should have mentioned earlier that the title of the symposium offers in German the double meaning of Austria’s annexation… Continue reading →

On cue, just as the conference in Vienna ‘Im Anschluss’ begins, (see the article on the conference elsewhere on this page), a review of ‘Forbidden Music’ appears in a German publication that highlights… Continue reading →