Reviewer Profiles
Dr John Allison
is Editor of Opera and Music Critic of The Times. He also contributes to Opera News, BBC Music Magazine, Classic fM Magazine, The Financial Times, The Evening Standard, The Observer and The Australian. He is a pianist and organist (he held the post of Assistant Organist at Cape Town Cathedral), and is also the author of Edward Elgar - Sacred Music and Pocket Companion to Opera.Martin Anderson
is a writer and publisher. He is a former Editor of Economic Affairs and The OECD Observer and is a regular contributor to The Independent, The Evening Standard, Fanfare, Tempo, Listen to Norway and various other publications. He is a specialist in Nordic and Baltic music and is also a writer on economic issues. He publishes books on music under the name of Toccata Press.Professor Christopher Ballantine
holds the L. G. Joel Chair of Music at the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa, and is Director of the Graduate Programme in Music. He is a Fellow of the University of Natal and won the Top Researcher Award (Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa, 1996). His books include Music and its Social Meanings, Twentieth Century Symphony, Marabi Nights: Early South African Jazz and Vaudeville; he is also the author of numerous articles in a diverse range of journals including Musical Quarterly, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, African Music, Music Review and New Society.Lucy Beckett
is a writer of criticism, poetry and fiction. She is a contributor to Music and Letters, The Times Literary Supplement and The Tablet, to cite just a few. Her published books include the Cambridge Opera Handbook on Wagner's Parsifal.Edward Bhesania
was Assistant Editor of BBC Proms Publications before becoming Publications Manager at the LSO. He writes CD reviews for The Observer and concert reviews for Musical Opinion.Christopher Breunig
trained and practised as an architect, but over the years contributed music reviews to various publications, including the Sunday Times, Guardian and other specialist journals including International Piano Quarterly and International Classical Record Collector. He has recently become a freelance writer again, after 14 years as Music Editor of Hi-Fi News & Record Review.Jonathon Brown
an artist, writer and intermittent broadcaster, was formerly a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and Music Correspondent for Scotland on Sunday. Since moving to live on a hillside north of Nice he has written three composers' lives for Pavilion/Classic fM (Brahms, Debussy and Puccini) and broadcasts a weekly three-hour ransacking of his record collection on Riviera Radio (Monte-Carlo). As an artist, his work includes opera stage designs; his first children's book illustrations are to be published by Gallimard later this year.Dr Alison Bullock
is an Editor of The Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; she also contributes to The Consort, Early Music, Early Music News and Organists' Review. Her Ph.D. subject was the music of Machaut.Piers Burton-Page
joined the BBC in 1971, since which time he has worked mostly for BBC Radio 3. Currently he is an Executive Producer in Radio Classical Music but he also continues with occasional presentation work, concentrating on opera. He has a particular interest in British music of the past 100 years, and in 1994 he published Philharmonic Concerto, the authorized biography of Sir Malcolm Arnold.David Cairns
is a writer. He contributes to a wide range of journals including The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, The Spectator and the ENO Opera Guides (Falstaff and The Magic Flute). He was the co-founder of The Chelsea Opera Group in 1950, the Classical Programme Co-ordinator of Philips Records from 1967-73 and founder and conductor of The Thorington Players (1983). Volume 2 of his life of Berlioz won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 1999.Hugh Canning
writes about classical music every week in The Sunday Times. He is a member of the Editorial board of Opera magazine and writes occasionally for The Australian.Christopher Cook
is a freelance broadcaster and journalist. He contributes to The Guardian, The Independent, Insight Japan, Gramophone and International Opera Collector. He is a radio presenter for BBC Radios 3, 4 and 5 and BBC World Service, on programmes which have included Kaleidoscope, Third Ear, Third Opinion, Nightwaves and Meridian. He is currently presenting the BBC Radio 3 music programmes Morning Performance and Performing Bach and live relays from the Royal Opera House. He is also preparing a feature programme for BBC World Service on 'The Silver Tassie'.Professor Edward Corp
is a Professor at the University of Paris (Université de Paris VII) and has written three books on the Stuart Court in exile after 1689. He also contributes to 17 diverse journals including Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music and Letters, Revue de Musicologie, Apollo, Burlington Magazine and History Today.Jed Distler
is a New York-based composer and pianist. He is Artistic Director of Composers Collaborative Inc., an organization devoted to the presentation of new music. His recorded work can be found on CRI, Point and Decca. A Contributing Editor to Piano & Keyboard, he reviews regularly for Gramophone, Schwann/Opus, ClassicsToday.com, Amazon.com and other music publications.Dr David Fanning
is Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. He has contributed to The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph and Gramophone. He has also contributed to Companion to the Symphony (ed. R. Layton), Man and Music: The Late Romantic Era (ed. J. Samson), The Carl Nielsen Companion (ed. M. Miller), Carl Nielsen: The Man and the Music (CD-ROM, ed. K. Ketting). His published books include Nielsen's Fifth Symphony and Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony. He is the Area Editor for 'Russia, Scandinavia and 20th Century Pianists' in The Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He has been a pianist with The Lindsays since 1979.Dr Mortimer Frank
is Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York. He currrently teaches at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. His writings on music have appeared in a variety of learned and popular journals including Fanfare, Keynote, Opera News, International Classical Record Collector and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His book Arturo Toscanini: the NBC Years, is to be published soon by Amadeus Press.Michael Glover
studied piano and violin before reading mathematics at Cambridge University. He now divides his time between working for a Japanese investment bank - in derivatives arbitrage - and writing on music. He is the Editorial Consultant of International Piano Quarterly.Harris Goldsmith
is a pianist, author, teacher and musicologist. He was a Contributing Editor to High Fidelity from 1960-83 (also its Chief Music Critic). He was also the Program Annotator for The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festivals. He has written for many other publications, including The Strad, The Musical Times, Musical America and The New York Post. He has given concerts in the USA, Canada, Austria and the UK and has recorded for CBS, RCA, Stradivari Classics, Music & Arts and the Musical Heritage Society. He teaches at the Mannes College of Music and presently resides in New York City.Julian Haylock
is currently Editor of International Piano Quarterly, following spells as Editor of CD Review magazine (UK) and Reviews Editor of CD Classics. Julian is the author of books on Rachmaninov and Mahler, co-author of a series of annual pocket record guides to classical music on CD, and continues to contribute reviews, features and interviews to a wide range of publications. He was the producer of a series of recordings that included the piano concertos of Alexander Tcherepnin (with Murray McLachlan), and has at other times been on-air reviewer for LBC radio and a freelance violinist-violist. He is currently working closely with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on a variety of projects.Dr Simon Heighes
is a writer and a regular contributor to The Times, The Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The Oxford Companion to Bach (1999). He is a broadcaster on BBC Radio 3's CD Review. He is the author of a book on two of Handel's contemporaries: The Lives and Works of William and Philip Hayes and the award-winning reconstruction of Bach's St Matthew Passion.Martin Hibble
was educated at Edinburgh's Royal High School and migrated to Australia in 1966, managing a classical record store in Sydney. He became involved in community radio, and rose to the position of senior broadcaster on ABC Classic FM. For 20 years Martin has produced and presented weekly programs with a critical look at new releases and classic reissues. A film music buff as well, his programme "Knowing the Score" has a cult following. Martin is also a video and DVD reviewer for the ABC's programme guide "24 Hours".Charles Hopkins
is a pianist and writer on music. He has contributed numerous articles on Romantic pianism to the forthcoming edition of The Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, as well as The Musical Times and International Piano Quarterly. His wide sphere of interests includes the music of Alkan, the New Weimar School, the Russian Modernists, d'Indy and the Schola Cantorum, and Godowsky, on whom he is currently completing a critical biography. His recording of Sorabji's Gulistan was critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic and he is actively involved in editing a number of the composer's unpublished manuscripts.John T. Hughes
is Deputy Editor of The Record Collector. He has also contributed to International Classical Record Collector, International Opera Collector, Opera on Record, Vol. 3, Gramophone and Classical Express. He writes booklet notes for CBS, Belart, Somm, Testament, EMI (the last with biographical notes for 'Record of Singing', Vol. 4). His vocal collection contains over 20,000 LPs and many (uncounted) CDs. He is the Chairman of the Record Vocal Art Society.Benjamin Ivry
is the author of the standard English-language biography of Francis Poulenc and a new life of Maurice Ravel, due to be published in Spring 2000. His poetry collection, Paradise for the Portuguese Queen is much involved with music, and his writings and translations have appeared in a diverse range of journals including The Yale Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, The Economist, Time, Newsday, The New York Times and Book Review. He is currently preparing a biography of Olivier Messiaen.Berta Joncus
is an Editor for The Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. She trained as a singer and musicologist at the Schubert Conservatory of Vienna and completed her graduate degree in musicology at Bonn University. She has worked in the areas of eighteenth-century music, Renaissance music and writers on music. As a singer, she is an early-music specialist, being a member of The Renaissance Singers under Edward Wickham and a soloist for St Michael's Church, Belgravia.Dr David Wyn Jones
is Senior Lecturer in Music at Cardiff University. He has written extensively on music of the Classical period, his most recent book being a biography of Beethoven in Cambridge University Press's 'Musical Lives' series.Pierre-Martin Juban
is Artistic Consultant of the music on film programmes at the Auditorium of the Louvre Museum in Paris. He has contributed to Piano - la lettre du musicien and International Piano Quarterly. He was Assistant film director on Gilles Apap plays 'Mozart's Third Violin Concerto' and the upcoming The Art of Violin (both directed by Bruno Monsaingeon). He has also written booklet notes for Philips and APR.Jonathan Keates
is a teacher and writer. He contributes to The Observer, The Independent, The Spectator, The Times and The Collins Classical Music Enclyclopedia. He is the author of Handel, The Man and His Music and autobiographies of Purcell and Stendhal. He has written a novel, The Strangers' Gallery, and three travel books (Tuscany, Umbria and Italian Journeys). His volume of short stories, Allegro Postillions, won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. His latest collection of short stories is called Soon to be a Major Motion Picture.John Kersey
graduated as the top pianist in his year from the Royal College of Music, London, and has since pursued a wide-ranging career with particular interests in criticism and music education. He has written for many journals including Tempo and Hi-Fi News and is a contributor to the recently published Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture.Francis Knights
studied at London and Oxford Universities and now works as a discographer, writer and editor. He specializes in Renaissance, Baroque and church music and is active as a singer and continuo player.Robert Layton
is the author of the standard Master Musicians study of Sibelius and has translated Erik Tawaststjerna's five-volume Sibelius biography. He was the BBC's Music Talks Producer in the 1960s and 1970s and a senior music producer in the 1980s. He was also General Editor of the BBC Music Guides and is the author of books on Berwald and Grieg and Dvorák's symphonies and concertos. He has for many years been one of the three authors of The Penguin CD Guide.Robert Levine
is a New York-based music and travel writer. He is Editorial Consultant for Amazon.com's classical music store which he helped to launch. He was Senior Classical Editor of Tower Record's Pulse! magazine and he contributes regularly to a wide range of publications including Stereophile, Fanfare and Classicstoday.com.Max Loppert
first wrote for The Financial Times in 1972; he joined the staff in 1976 and was Chief Music and Opera Critic from 1980-96. He was also the Associate Editor of Opera magazine from 1986-97. He has been a contributor to editions of New Grove and New Grove Opera, as well as occasional reviews and articles for a wide range of publications including The Times, The Guardian, BBC Music Magazine, Gramophone and International Piano Quarterly. He writes regular programme notes for Glyndebourne and San Francisco Opera and is Annual Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at University of Natal, Durban in South Africa. He is currently engaged on a life-and-works study of Gluck, due for publication by Faber in 2002.Malcolm MacDonald
is editor of Tempo, the quarterly magazine of modern music. He is a freelance writer, broadcaster, lecturer and contributor to many periodicals and symposia, as well as to the latest edition of The New Grove. His book on the music of Edgard Varèse, Astronomer in Sound, will be published later this year by Kahn & Averill. Other books include the 'Master Musicians' volumes on Brahms and Schoenberg (both to be issued this year by Oxford University Press in revised editions), a three-volume study of the 32 symphonies of Havergal Brian, monographs on the British composers John Foulds and Ronald Stevenson, catalogues of Dallapiccola, Shostakovich and Dorati and a tourist guide to the city of Edinburgh. He also composes (songs and piano pieces, mainly); his orchestration of the un-scored portions of Roberto Gerhard's 1939 ballet Soirées de Barcelone was premiered by the BBC Philharmonic in 1996.Farhan Malik
is a freelance writer, lecturer on music and a recognized authority on historical pianists. He has numerous published discographies and articles to his credit and also contributes to International Piano Quarterly and Piano & Keyboard.Donald Manildi
is the Curator of the International Piano Archives, University of Maryland. He is a former broadcaster, critic and discographer. He has had, to date, about 600 reviews and articles published in a wide range of publications including American Record Guide and International Piano Quarterly. He is also a pianist and his 'Pianists as Composers' CD has recently been released on Elan.Robert Matthew-Walker
is a composer, author and critic. He contributes to The Musical Times, Music and Musicians, Gramophone, Musical Opinion, Tempo, Hi-Fi News & Record Review, National Dictionary of Biography, and many more. He is the author of 22 books on music. He was Editor of Music and Musicians (1984-88) and is the composer of over 100 works and the producer of over 150 classical albums.Cyrus Meher-Homji
was the founder and Managing Editor of Australia's Soundscapes magazine and is now Marketing and Repertoire Manager of the classical division of Universal Music Australia. He holds undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in piano performance and musicology and has written widely for journals in Australia and overseas.Professor John Milsom
is Professor of Music at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA. He was formerly a reviewer for Gramophone. He has has also written extensively for BBC Music Magazine and Early Music and broadcasts regularly on BBC Radios 3 and 4 and BBC World Service. He is a leading authority on Renaissance music, with special interests in Ockeghem, Josquin, Tallis, Palestrina and Byrd. He has a lifelong interest in European twentieth-century avant-garde and in American minimalism.Ivan Moody
is a composer and writer on music. He has contributed to such publications as Contemporary Music Review, Early Music, Goldberg, Gramophone and The Musical Times.Nick Morgan
is now a freelance radio producer, having spent ten years as producer of Radio 3 music programmes including Record Review, Vintage Years and Behind the Masque. Prior to that he was a producer of science programmes on BBC Radios 3 and 4.Jeremy Nicholas
is an actor, writer, musician and broadcaster. His books include The Classic FM Guide to Classical Music, Godowsky: The Pianists' Pianist, The Beginners Guide to Opera and The Classic FM Good Music Guide. Among his published music are an album of songs ('Funny You Should Sing That'), various instrumental pieces and works for brass band, some of which have been recorded. He is a regular contributor to Classic CD, Classic FM and IPQ and has presented countless radio programmes over the years . An Olivier Award nominee and Sony Gold Award winner, he is also President of the Jerome K. Jerome Society.Jeremy Noble
has had a long career in musical scholarship and journalism. As a critic he wrote for a wide variety of journals including The Gramophone, The Times and The Sunday Telegraph. He was a frequent broadcaster with the BBC until he left the UK for the USA in the mid-1970s. After 20 years of teaching music history at the State University of New York at Buffalo he has returned to the UK, and will be reviewing records of Renaissance music for International Record Review.Patrick O'Connor
is a writer and broadcaster. He is a regular contributor to The Daily Telegraph, Literary Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Opera and The Economist. He was Consulting Editor to The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. His books include Josephine Baker and The Amazing Blonde Woman. In March 2000 he is presenting a four-part series on the music of Kurt Weill on BBC World Service.Michael Oliver
is a freelance writer and broadcaster on music. On radio he has presented many hundreds of magazine programmes and documentaries about music and the other arts. He writes for Gramophone, Classic CD and other magazines and has published biographies of Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten and a recent 'oral history' of twentieth-century music, Settling the Score.Mark Pappenheim
is a freelance music writer and editor. He worked in arts administration for many years, for companies including Buxton Festival, Welsh National Opera, Live Music Now and Opera North (where he was Publications Editor). He contributes to The Independent (on which he was Arts Editor from 1996-98), The Independent on Sunday, The New Statesman, The Express, BBC Music Magazine and Classic fM Magazine. He has been the Editor of BBC Proms Programmes since 1998.Tim Parry
is a writer and editor. He has contributed to New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Gramophone, International Piano Quarterly and Collins Encyclopedia of Classical Music.David Patmore
has held a wide range of positions in the field of music and arts management, with organizations including Glyndebourne Festival Opera, the English Opera Group, the Royal Opera Company, the King's Lynn Festival, Yorkshire Arts and Bradford and Sheffield City Councils. He has been reviewing records for over 20 years, for publications such as Fugue, Arts Yorkshire, Which CD?, International Classical Record Collector, Gramophone and Sounds. He is currently engaged on research into the influence of recording and the recording industry upon musical activity.Roger Pines
is a frequent contributor to opera publications in American and Britain. He has written for The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, BBC Music, Opera, Opera News, The Opera Quarterly, Opera America's "Voices" newsletter, and programs of opera companies throughout North America, including those of the Metropolitan Opera and San Francisco Opera. Pines also answers opera-related questions for CultureFinder, an on-line cultural information service. His liner notes appear in recent releases on the BMG, Decca, EMI, and Erato labels. He adjudicates annually for the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.Andrew Porter
was Music Critic of The New Yorker for 20 years and now writes for The Times Literary Supplement. His many opera translations (including ten of Mozart, Wagner's Ring, Tristan and Parsifal) have been widely performed: six of them are recorded. He is a vice-president of the Royal Musical Association and a Corresponding Member of the American Musicological Society. Five volumes of his collected New Yorker writings have been published.Stephen Pruslin
is chief répétiteur for major opera productions and recordings. As well as being the author of many programme-notes and CD booklets, he has recorded his own interval features for live opera broadcasts. He was a regular contributor to International Opera Collector. He is the librettist of Birtwistle's Punch and Judy, which was chosen by The Guardian and BBC Radio 3 as one of 'The Vital Fifty' operas on CD.Peter J. Rabinowitz
is Professor of Comparative Literature at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York City. He divides his time between music and narrative theory. He is the author of Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation and co-author, with Michael W. Smith, of Authorizing Readers: Resistance and Respect in the Teaching of Literature; he is also co-editor, with James Phelan, of Understanding Narrative. His published articles, which have appeared in such books as The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism and such journals as Critical Inquiry, PMLA, and19th-Century Music, cover a wide range of subjects, from Dostoyevsky to Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth, from detective fiction to the ideology of musical structure, from Mahler to Scott Joplin. He has been active as a music critic for more than 20 years, and currently serves as a Contributing Editor of Fanfare.Carl Rosman
Carl Rosman is a clarinettist and conductor, based in Sydney, Australia. He has written widely on music, contributing to publications such as Soundscapes, Sounds Australian and Musik & Ästhetik. He has performed throughout Australia and Europe, as well as in the USA, Japan and South Korea, both as a soloist and as a member of the Australian new-music ensembles Elision and Libra, and has worked directly with a wide range of composers from Gavin Bryars to Brian Ferneyhough.Barrymore Lawrence Scherer
is a critic, author and lecturer on music and the fine and decorative arts. He contributes to The Wall Street Journal and is Contributing Editor of Art and Auction. He wrote for eight years for The New York Times. He has been a commentator for National Public Radio and has lectured widely at venues including the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the National Gallery (Washington), Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, the Victorian Society in America, and many others. He wrote the historical notes for The Philadelphia Centennial Collection: Historic Broadcasts and Recordings, 1917-1998. He is the author and illustrator of Bravo, A Guide to Opera for the Perplexed.Graham Simpson
is active in both the classical and popular fields. He has pursued a varied course in music-making and music journalism and has contributed to a number of magazines and publications on both sides of the Atlantic.W. Dean Sutcliffe
is Lecturer in Music at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine's College. His main research interests lie in eighteenth-century music.He is currently finishing a book on the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and has recently edited a volume of Haydn Studies for Cambridge University Press.Michael Tanner
teaches Philosophy at Cambridge University and is the Opera Critic of The Spectator. He has written books on Wagner and Nietzsche, and edited Furtwängler's Notebooks. He is a regular contributor to various CD magazines.Roger Thomas
is a full-time writer on music. His work has appeared in over a dozen reference books, newspapers, websites and magazines including Gramophone, Piano, Music Teacher and Jazz Review in the UK and the music and audio magazine Listener in the USA, to which he is Contributing Editor. His many books in the field of music education are published by Heinemann and he is currently working on a book of music criticism for Quartet Books. He also teaches, performs and records as a percussionist.Charles Timbrell,
is Professor of Music and Co-ordinator of Keyboard Studies at Howard University, Washington, DC. He is also a pianist and is the author of French Pianism and of articles and reviews in Music and Letters, Fanfare, Piano & Keyboard and The Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He has performed numerous concerts throughout the USA, Canada and Europe; his recordings can be found on the Dante label.David Trendell
is Director of Chapel Music and Lecturer in Music, King's College, London and Director of Music, St Bartholomew the Great. He contributes to The Tablet and The Musical Times. He is well known as a choral conductor, both at King's, St Bartholomew the Great and also at the Edinburgh Festival. His specialities are sixteenth-century music and late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Austro/German music. He broadcasts (as conductor) for Radio 3 and has recorded with the Choir of King's College, London.Dr Raymond S. Tuttle
is Administrator at Mary Washington College, a four-year liberal arts college in Fredericksburg, Virginia, USA. He contributes to a wide range of journals including Fanfare, Soundscapes, Miami New Times, Esquire and Piano & Keyboard. He studied piano for more than ten years, and sings in a non-professional choir.Eric Van Tassel
is a full-time freelance writer, having worked for twenty-odd years in academic publishing and in the record industry. Born and educated in America, he now lives in a village near Cambridge (UK); he graduated from Amherst College but defeated the efforts of two great universities to award him a higher degree in musicology. His interests embrace music of most periods from 1500 to 1900. He has written for Gramophone, Fanfare, the New York Times, Music and Vision, Early Music, Early Music America, Goldberg, and other publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He wrote the chapter on church music for The Purcell Companion (Faber 1995).Dr Emma Wakelin
is an Editor of The Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and a freelance writer and editor. She has contributed to the forthcoming Collins Classical Music Encyclopedia and also reviews books for Music and Letters and Early Music. Her research interests centre on the music of late-Renaissance Italy.Stephen Walsh
is a University Reader and writer on music. He contributes to several newspapers, including The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Observer, The Financial Times and The Independent. He is the author of The Lieder of Schumann, Bartók Chamber Music, The Music of Stravinsky, Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex and Stravinsky: A Creative Spring.John Warrack
is a musicologist and retired Lecturer in Music, University of Oxford. He has published books on Weber and Tchaikovsky and is the co-author of the Oxford Dictionary of Opera. His latest book, German Opera, is due to be published by Cambridge University Press later this year. He contributes to several journals including The Times Literary Supplement, Gramophone, Music and Letters and Opera.