Two weeks in Rome – part one.
In January 2025, I spent two weeks on holiday in an apartment in the centre of the Centro Storico (Historic Centre) of Rome and I felt I had lived there for ever. It was like being at home, but with…
Category Music
Me and my virtual art gallery
Welcome to Glinka Gallery, it's open 24/7. it has six individual galleries for fine art, photography, poetry, dance and music and it is just a few finger clicks away from you wherever you are. I want to show you around.
Ravenna – Italy’s forgotten capital, a beautiful city of mosaics and poets.
The beautiful city of Ravenna, on the East Coast of Italy, in Emilia-Romagna, sits between Venice and Rimini, but is less crowded than its more famous neighbours. Once, however, it was the capital of Italy and one of the grandest…
Schoenberg in Lewes
I live just up the street from the Lewes Chamber Music Festival, now in its 12th year, and I’m just back from the final concert of this year’s truly inspiring festival. The theme was Schoenberg and friends, and the festival…
Back to Lahti in September 2023
It was like coming home when I looked out of the window of the apartment in Lahti, just as it felt like leaving home when I said goodbye to the cottage in Virtaa, near the little town of Sysmä, after…
I’m a Berliner now
I was in Germany in April 2023, I’d been to Leipzig for the Bach 300 festival before catching a train for ten great days in Berlin. A city I last visited in the late 1990s, just a few years after…
An Easter Meeting in Leipzig with JS Bach – 300 years on.
Even people who don’t think they like classical music know and even like at least some of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750). Those who love classical music are mostly in consensus that he was probably the…
Trying to be the best man in Georgia
I was checked in at the Old Metekhi Hotel over-looking the Mtkvari River in Tbilisi, Georgia , on 13th September 2022, after a booking that had been made in 2019, long before Covid changed everyone’s plans. I was here to…
Ainola, Finland – Jean and Aino Sibelius’ place.
I was in Finland in August and September 2022 and, when I was staying in Helsinki, it was relatively easy to get a train for the 24 mile journey to a place I had read about often and wondered what…
A week in Helsinki – homely art nouveau city by the water.
In September 2022, after a wonderful time at the Sibelius Festival in Lahti, I stayed on in Finland for another week and moved to Helsinki, a place that everyone I know who has been there to told me that I…