In an interview on Classical Music

Your first book?

Shaw’s Music: I think all these books are very good for demystifying the whole process of music-making, and George Bernard Shaw was great at that. He represented a school that was aiming at shedding the pomposity and pretentiousness in music criticism. He takes a very witty, very down-to-earth approach. He’ll spend as much time on the officiousness of provincial stewards and ushers as he will on the music and whoever is singing. He’s got a very good eye for those details that make it more relevant and interesting to the non-musical ear. His reviews are so much fun – almost every week I go back to another, and they’ve got brilliant titles as well: ‘Murder by the Bach Choir’, ‘Stuffing a Sonata’. They’re brilliantly digressive and quite arrogant in some ways, and he’s often talking about his personal inconveniences, but it’s always fun.

Shaw was also a great pioneer: he championed all sorts of composers we now take for granted, like Gluck, and he was particularly keen on the early music revival at that time, which has now become incredibly important, with a whole different audience for that music: Handel, Purcell, and early Baroque music like Scarlatti.