Inside BBC Music Magazine February 2021 issue

As we go to press with this issue, 2021 has barely begun – the pandemic, of course, is still with us, although the promise of an end to it all is welcome indeed. The music world faces an almighty challenge in the months to come, not just to perform live to audiences once more, but also to ensure that those audiences haven’t fallen by the wayside in the intervening year.
Music’s paths have seldom been entirely straight and smooth. Sparked by visits from Franz Liszt and John Field, ‘pianomania’ swept through Tsarist Russia from the mid-19th century and musicians did everything in their power to keep playing, despite the considerable obstacles of distance, landscape, weather and politics. Wives transported instruments thousands of miles across the tundra in the dead of winter to their exiled Decembrist husbands, while hundreds of pianos were hidden throughout Russia at the height of Communism. Bechsteins in their thousands made their way eastwards on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and European factories set up Russian outposts to feed demand, before closing down years later or rebranding as cheap Soviet instruments. Sophy Roberts’s fascinating feature on p44 tells of her epic search for these lost pianos, and reminds us that music really can overcome the seemingly impossible.

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• BBC Sky at Night – February 2021
• BBC Gardeners’ World – February 2021