I have written about cats in song in a previous post, but two weeks in Margate dog-sitting an aristocratic Hungarian Vizsla got me...

A brief up-date on Charles Court Opera's 'The Barber of Seville' at Wilton's Music Hall. A return visit to see the alternative Almaviva...

I have had a few musical 'I was there' moments in my life: I saw Thomas Allen's first 'Billy Budd', I watched the Terfel/Hvorostovsky...

Listening to Herbert Howells’ setting of the Walter de la Mare poem ‘King David’ (BBC Radio 3’s  Essential Classics ‘Song of the Day’ –...

This review of Charles Court Opera’s production of ‘The Barber of Seville’ at Wilton’s Music Hall cannot claim to be in any way objective...

The Oriel Music Trust provided a very useful service in providing recordings of opera, choral and vocal music taken from BBC Radio 3 (or...

This month sees the publication of yet another book demonstrating Thomas Hardy's less than sympathetic treatment of his two wives, (Hardy...

‘Turning the Screw’, Kevin Kelly’s new play now being performed at the King’s Head Theatre, invites obvious comparisons with Alan...

An erudite young friend of mine is walking out with an equally erudite young lady called Julia. I assumed he knew Robert Herrick’s ‘Julia...

All the heavy lifting for this posting is being done by far better writers than I. I just wanted to share two poems that seem to me to be...

In my previous Blog on smoking and singing (‘My Lady Nicotine’), I mentioned that my father suffered from early onset dementia, partly,...

I had not heard of Claude Vivier (1948-1983) before hearing his Piece pour violoncelle et piano that started the wonderfully stimulating...

There's not a Shakespeare sonnet Or a Beethoven quartet That's easier to like than you Or harder to forget. You think that sounds...

Purcell’s ‘The Fairy Queen’ is, in many ways, very hard to perform effectively. A series of masques intended to be interpolated between...

epiphany [ɪˈpɪf(ə)ni, ɛˈpɪf(ə)ni] NOUN 1.      the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi (Matthew 2:1–12)....

‘Auld Lang Syne’ is all very well, but it has never felt like ‘mine’ in the way, for example, ‘Jerusalem’ does, so I shall not be singing...

Our cat Sid was killed this morning, hit by a car. These few random thoughts are in his memory. Sid and his sister Nancy were named, not...

Friday 8th December, was the day of Shane MacGowan’s funeral. My Blog is mainly concerned with ‘classical’ singers but, as I said when...

I don’t ‘do’ Facebook so I’m grateful to my son Hugo Herman-Wilson for forwarding a posting detailing the ten ‘greatest’ British...

In my review of James Newby’s recital disc ‘Fallen to Dust’, I said that one of my favourite baritones was John Shirley-Quirk and here I...