Mathew Lyons

1 month ago | thespectator.com | Damian Thompson |Michael Hann |Mathew Lyons |Anne Daniel

Three projects shedding light on the sacred music of J.S. Bach are nearing completion. The first consists of an epic twenty-five-year project to record all the composer’s vocal works — passions, masses, motets and 200-odd cantatas — in electrifying performances supplemented by lectures and workshops. At the helm is a Swiss choral conductor renowned for his improvisatory skills — and surely the only baroque specialist to have played Sidney Bechet on a chamber organ.

1 month ago | thespectator.com | Stephen Hough |Michael Hann |Mathew Lyons |Anne Daniel

My Piano Concerto, “The World of Yesterday,” began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic: would I like to write a score for a movie about a concert pianist writing a piano concerto? As I looked at my concert diary, blank but for Zoom calls, it seemed like a wonderful way to keep busy.

1 month ago | historytoday.com | Mathew Lyons

The Reformation in Switzerland began quietly. On the evening of 9 March 1522, the first Sunday in Lent, what one historian has called ‘the ostentatious eating of sausages’ took place in the parlour of Zurich printer Christoph Froschauer. It was a provocative act, in breach of church rules on fasting. Twelve people were present. Some later became Anabaptists; one, a bootmaker named Hottinger, would be beheaded in Baden two years later for challenging the Mass.

1 month ago | thespectator.com | James Cahill |Toby Young |Emily Rhodes |Mathew Lyons

Edmund White grew up in a world where sex, and gay sex in particular, was an unspoken reality. In 1950s Cincinnati, “no one ‘came out’ except drag queens and the campy peroxided waiter at the diner,” he writes in the first chapter of The Loves of My Life. That blanket of near-silence doesn’t seem to have inhibited him much. He was sexually precocious from the age of twelve, as his autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) first suggested.

2 months ago | telegraph.co.uk | Mathew Lyons

It is March 27, 669 BC, and night has fallen over Nineveh, the Assyrian capital. On the temple roof, Balasi, chief astrologer to king Esarhaddon, is scanning the sky. An adviser has told the king that Venus is visible, which in Assyrian cosmology is a good thing, portending good rain, rich harvests and peace. Balasi knows it can’t be true: Assyrian scholars have been recording the night sky and its predictable motions for a thousand years. But he’s compelled to check.