This ‘Chevalier’ makes too many cuts - Serenade
Four years ago, I wrote a column, ‘Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow’, celebrating the life and times of a then little-known French-Caribbean composer, the first classical composer of African descent to attain widespread acclaim in European music: Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799). At the time I had said that “his life-story reads like a Hollywood blockbuster”: in addition to being a composer, he was a much-admired (and much-envied) virtuoso violinist, an expert athlete, the “greatest fencer in […]