It is unusual to have one composers’ works comprise an entire programme and probably even harder to pull it off while keeping the audience’s attention. Yet the magnificent collection of Anthony Ritchie works showcased at this wonderful concert were totally captivating! After the Concert I had the great honour to informally interview these 3 very special and highly gifted musicians - composer Anthony Ritchie, conductor Peter Scholes, and soloist Alexa Still...

Melissa Snoza is a co-founder and flutist of Fifth House Ensemble (5HE), a large chamber ensemble based in Chicago founded in 2005, with 10 musicians as members, who perform a wide range of traditional and non-traditional music in traditional and non-traditional settings......

Excerpts from an interview with Matthias Ziegler by Nancy Andrew

Richard Nunns has been a key figure in the revival of Maori wind instruments, and his life has been a fascinating journey that re-affirms my faith in the adage that if you want to then you can do anything...

At the 2009 NFA Convention in New York, I caught up with Jim Walker and asked his musical journey and how he got to where he is today...

At the 2009 NFA Convention in New York, I caught up with Aldo Baerten and asked him about what interests and motivates him to do all that he does in the flute world...

Over the course of her career Kemler has proven to be a versatile, energetic player with a knack for adapting music to her own personal styling. As a world class contemporary flutist, Kemler has shown the fluting community that you don’t have to stick with what you start with to be a successs...

"Flute repair is tedious, time consuming and exacting," Phil Unger says. "You have to be mellow."

But there are compensations. Flutes need his special touch, but so do their players. Nurturing relationships with clients entails entertaining flutists from around the world over leisurely meals....

Joseph Schwantner studied guitar with Robert Stein. Schwantner described Stein as an amazing teacher and told many anecdotes about his lessons. He explained how compassionate his teacher was when Schwantner added ‘filigree’ to the assigned music, or when he brought in his own compositions to play instead of what his teacher assigned. Recognizing that Schwantner had a talent for composition, Stein introduced music theory into his lessons. In one lesson Schwantner told his teacher that he would love to play Dvorak’s New World Symphony on guitar; to his amazement, in the next lesson Stein had arranged all the major themes from the symphony for guitar...

For many of us, we find the musical world divided into a well established series of genres and, for the most part, these categories work fairly well on their own. It is, therefore, a gifted individual who can take the worlds of Jazz, Classical and native Venezuelan music and fuse them together so seamlessly that they might never have been apart...