BEWITCHING: Frances Alda, the once forgotten rival of Nellie Melba Whilst Melba is well known to Australians, one of the nation’s icons, Alda has been substantially forgotten. Yet she was one of the world’s greatest sopranos, sufficiently outstanding to have been...
Phoebus Apollo driving the Horses of the Sun Waking in Australia, first light streaming through the window, or better still noticing dawn creeping over the horizon from the inside of the early morning flight over the mountains towards Botany Bay, one is immediately...
Empress Elisabeth of Austria goes hunting at Astrop I’ve recently been doing some work on the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and on the rise of opera in Naples, and it all jogged my memory of the day that the Empress Elisabeth of Austria went hunting...
My Life In Art I grew up in a house in the English Midlands with few pictures on the walls, but nothing I recognised as ‘art’, and it was only when I took a job in advertising in London in the mid-1960s that I decided to explore that world. So, on my way to and from...