On Wednesday I paid a visit to the Rubens exhibition at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Belgium. Rubens, perhaps the best known of all Flemish Painters, lived from 1577 to 1640. He was a hugely talented portrait painter. His studies, for example of an old man used in ‘Christ and the Adulterous Woman’, and of a moor used […]
On Monday I heard the Flemish cellist Roel Dieltiens playing Brahms and Schubert with his chamber music group Ensemble Explorations. The two works featured were Brahms’ second sextet Op. 36 and Schubert’s string quintet in C. The musicians played on ‘original’ instruments – that meant, for example, gut strings, and no spikes for the cellos. The resulting sound, […]
Percy Bysshe Shelley was a most unusual man. He was born to privilege in a wealthy family. He began writing poetry very young and published his first novel while at Oxford University. After less than a year he was thrown out of the University for his atheistic views. At the age of 19 he eloped to Scotland […]
At first thought it might seem strange that an English woman living in Belgium should be singing the works of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. In fact, I have been mad about Brecht ever since studying “Mutter Courage” for A-level German at school. In Kurt Weill he found the perfect composer for his ideas. Anna is […]
This week has seen me concentrating on the educative project Etoiles et Voix that has been set up by the Réseau de Musiciens en Ateliers. Etoiles et Voix is a project that runs alongside this year’s Queen Elisabeth Competition for Voice in Belgium, and introduces primary school children to opera arias that are to be sung by the competitors. […]
