The Goldschmidt work I love and cherish the most is a quartet he wrote on arrival in London as a Hitler refugee, a work that was first performed in a music-loving doctor’s waiting room on Harley Street.

The orchestra has laid off almost one-third of its administrative staff ‘in direct response to the devastating financial effects of COVID-19’.

Press release:

As a result of lost revenue and an undetermined timetable for return to full operations, the organization will lay off 50 employees out of a current full-time administrative staff of 180 (30 additional positions have been frozen or left vacant since March 2020). The remaining full-time staff will number 130. The plan at this time also includes eight full-time staff members being furloughed at various periods from September through December. The layoffs and furloughs have been determined following an analysis of the orchestra’s operations and the staffing needed given the reduced workload during the upcoming period of live performance hiatus.

The doublebass virtuoso Leon Bosch talks in the first of the Wigmore Hall lecture-recitals about growing up as an anti-apartheid activist in authoritarian South Africa.

‘My first memory as a child was of men with dark suits in my bedroom… Our house was raided quite often.

From a review of a new book on Cage’s passion for mycology.

In a light-hearted essay from 1954 entitled Music Lovers’ Field Companion, he wrote, “I would like to emphasise that I am not interested in the relationships between sounds and mushrooms any more than I am in those between sounds and other sounds.” 

Read on here.