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Reviewer profiles
IRR’s reviewers are experts from around the world, renowned for their scholarship, enthusiasm and lively writing style. Many are already highly regarded in their chosen musical fields but we will also introduce new writers who are establishing themselves in the world of classical music comment.
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.
Peter Branscombe is Emeritus Professor of Austrian Studies at the University of St Andrews, where he spent most of his career teaching German language and literature, and Austrian theatre and culture in particular of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has been a record reviewer for many years, and has broadcast frequently on BBC Radio Three and Austrian Radio. He is currently editing for the new Complete Edition the last plays of the great Viennese satirist, Johann Nestroy. His opera handbook on The Magic Flute was published by CUP in 1991, and he has written numerous articles for The New Grove and Opera Grove, as well as articles for journals and commemorative volumes on musical and literary topics, and notes for gramophone companies and the programmes of many opera houses.
Christopher Breunig trained and practised as an architect, but over the years contributed music reviews to various publications, including the Sunday Times, the Guardian and other specialist journals including International Piano and Classic Record Collector. He has become a freelance writer again, after 14 years as Music Editor of Hi-Fi News.
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.
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 also prepared 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. Jim 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 by Amadeus Press.
Michael Glover studied piano and violin before reading mathematics at Cambridge University. He now divides his time between working for an investment bank and writing on music.
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, following spells as Editor of CD Review magazine (UK) and Reviews Editor of CD Classics. He 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, producer and broadcaster. He is the author of a book on Handel's English contemporaries, the architect of an award-winning reconstruction of Bach's St Mark Passion, and has contributed to the Oxford Composer Companion to Bach and The Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He broadcasts regularly for the BBC World Service and Radio 3.
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.
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's play '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 Dvorak'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.
Calum 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 Revised New Grove. His book on the music of Edgard Varese, 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 Soirees 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, approximately 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 discs.
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 the Revised 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 America 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 programmes of opera companies throughout North America, including those of the Metropolitan Opera and San Francisco Opera. Roger 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.
Christopher Price is a lawyer working in Sydney, Australia. He is a repertoire adviser to the period instrument Australian Brandenburg Orchestra. Until 1997, he wrote on Early Music and reviewed Early Music recordings for Soundscapes. He is also a contributor to Goldberg and Period-Instruments-CD.com.
Stephen Pruslin is chief repetiteur 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, and 19th-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 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 Laurence 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. He has given 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 at 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 BBC 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 20-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 and a freelance writer and editor. She has contributed to the recently published 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, most recently, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring.
Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, librettist and musician. She writes plays and features for Radios 3 and 4, broadcasts regularly as a reviewer and was one of the erstwhile presenters of Radio 3's early music programme 'Spirit of the Age'. Her books include 'Gardens of Eden Revisited' (poetry), 'Postwar British Drama: Looking Back in Gender', and 'Guests in the Body' (stories). Her early music group 'Siena Ensemble' specialises in themed music and words programmes and is currently touring with an event based on the music of Salamone Rossi.
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. He contributes to several journals including the Times Literary Supplement, Gramophone, Music and Letters and Opera.
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