In today’s Guardian, Charlotte Higgins gains access to the composer’s medical notes, which were not available to his biographer, Paul Kildea. She also talks to the senior registrar who looked after Britten in hospital at the time Kildea says he was found to have syphilis. The notes give no indication of venereal disease, even by euphemism, and the cardiologist says the circumstances described by Kildea are ‘rubbish’.
Read more HERE.
© Brian Seed/Lebrecht Music & Arts
© Brian Seed/Lebrecht Music & Arts
Hundreds more caricatures available at www.lebrecht.co.uk for the 200th birth anniversary year of these two major composers.
Obituary pictures for Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, British composer 29 March 1935 – 24 December 2012.
© Carl Pendle/Lebrecht Music & Arts
London 1965.
© Horst Tappe/Lebrecht Music & Arts
Stephen Jackson and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett – Stephen Jackson and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett after a performance of Four Poems of Thomas Campion at the BBC Proms 2007.
© C. Christodoulou/Lebrecht Music & Arts
London, Islington 27th July 1984.
© George Newson/Lebrecht Music & Arts
Playing the piano in a rehearsal with the BBC Concert Orchestra, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 2 March 2006.
© Vicky Alhadeff/Lebrecht Music & Arts
28 December 2012 will mark 75 years since the death of French composer Maurice Ravel. Perhaps best known for his orchestral work Boléro, which was originally commissioned as a ballet by Russian ballerina Ida Rubenstein, he ranks as one of the most influential composers of the early 20th century.
Click on the image below to see a selection of Ravel images from the Lebrecht Music & Arts collection:
