Hamilton Score News Today

The film-maker Ridley Scott turned 86 just last week but he’s still producing epics. The man who directed Hannibal and Thelma and Louise among others has now brought Napoleon to the big screen.

Back in my London days, when I was based in Broadcasting House just up from Oxford Circus, I’d often take a lunchtime stroll through the smart grid of streets behind the West End’s temples of commerce.

Believe it or not, there’s a place that connects the Republic of Ireland’s most recent football manager and one of the most prestigious concert venues in the world — the medieval capital of Scotland, the city of Dunfermline.

Leafing through my dictionary of music the other day, a thought struck me. Between Antonio Lolli (18th ­century Italian violinist and composer) and I Lombardi (the first Verdi opera to make it to America) there should surely be an entry for “lollipop”.

The Auvergne in southern France counts as one of the country’s most rural regions. A couple of hours to the west of the city of Lyon you’re in among mountains and dormant volcanoes and tracts of hilly agricultural land that border the rivers, notably the Loire and the Dordogne.

We’re now almost midway through Black History Month. Launched in the United States in February 1926 as Black History Week to coincide with the anniversaries of the births of two figures prominent in the abolition of slavery — former president Abraham Lincoln and social reformer Frederick Douglass — in Ireland and the UK it’s celebrated each October.

There are musical ­anniversaries aplenty associated with October 7. It was a Friday in 1932 when the London ­Philharmonic Orchestra first took to the stage. Hard to believe now that the musical public in the English capital was remarkably ill served back then.

With all the talk in recent weeks about the exodus of European footballers lured by petrodollars to the Saudi ­Arabian League, it’s worth recalling another case of money talking back in the day. For Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim ­Benzema — two of soccer’s biggest names — read the Czech composer Antonin Dvorák.

In German, they’re known as lieder. In French they’re mélodies. In English, they get the rather grandiose title of ‘art song’, to distinguish them from popular vocal music and folksong.