Fifty years ago, Kathleen Ferrier, the greatest lyric contralto Britain has ever produced, lost her courageous battle with breast cancer. Her name endures to this day, for she struck a chord with a wide-ranging public - in concerts, on records and on the radio - despite a career which lasted barely ten years. Within a decade this former telephone exchange operator was singing on stage at Covent Garden or before royalty at private parties. She was surely fun to know: this collection of 300+ letters and twelve years of her personal diaries give a sunny picture of her life in the muted post-war...

The Austro-Hungarian Hans Richter (1843-1916) was the first career-conductor to gain international fame. His first appointment was to Budapest, and he went on to dominate music-making in Vienna, Bayreuth, London, Manchester (with the Halle Orchestra) and other towns and cities in Britain and Europe between 1865 and 1912. Richter gave first performances of works by Wagner, Brahms, Elgar, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Stanford and Parry and helped to further the careers of Dvorak, Sibelius, Bartok and Glazunov. Christopher Fifield's remarkable study explores the personality, life and work of a...