Richard Bratby

Hitting the high notes

The CBSO offers one of the UK's most ambitious festivals – but don't overlook Northampton's Malcolm Arnold celebration

issue 06 January 2018

Claude Debussy died on 25 March 1918 to the sound of explosions. Four days earlier, the Kaiser’s army had deployed its long-range Paris Gun, and as Debussy’s cancer entered its final hours, artillery shells were bursting in the streets around his home in Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. This quiet modernist — who’d transformed music into an art of almost limitless expressive subtlety — died amid the thunder of mechanised war.

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