Archive
5 October 2011
One moment — BBC presenter Zane Lowe's on-air dismissal of Beyoncé's Glastonbury performance — has haunted Stephen Graham for months. To him it shows up layers of predjudices about music still rife in our society.
1 September 2011
To celebrate the bicentenary of Franz Liszt's birth, amateur pianist James Holden sets himself a new challenge.
30 August 2011
Who is Kevin Volans? George Rafael goes looking for an answer after hearing the composer's latest piano concerto at the BBC Proms.
26 August 2011
Was the Gloaming – the new venture of Martin Hayes, Dennis Cahill, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, Iarla Ó Lionáird and Thomas Bartlett – to be a well-intentioned experiment, or did it amount to something more promising?
19 August 2011
A couple of phone-calls to Sarkozy and Merkel and Breándán Ó hEaghra has all but solved Ireland's economic crisis — it’s a fool-proof plan to sell off the one thing that really is priceless.
15 August 2011
Nico Muhly's opera delves into the dark side of the internet, but the subject matter longs for riskier, less guarded treatment, writes Dónal Sarsfield.
12 August 2011
Hearing Lisa Hannigan, James Vincent McMorrow and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh in a cave in County Cork, Aoife Flynn is reminded of the simple intimacies in that link thousands of years of music.
11 August 2011
Playing solo brings a whole set of musical problems. How do you balance the musical elements? How do you develop ideas? At a concert in Dublin, Francesco Turrisi, Shane Latimer, Gerry O'Beirne and Solo Cissokho showed four different ways of dealing with these challenges.
26 July 2011
Musicians need to think carefully about the impact of technology on their music, writes Peter Rosser.
13 July 2011
Through her songs, the New York musician Laurie Anderson resembles an anthropologist – but it is the ambiguity of her instrumental work that catches Alan Murphy's ear.