In my interview with the kora player, singer and songwriter Sophie Lukacs we hear her very unique and personal story and also learn about this beautiful instrument. This is the full transcript of the interview, and includes links to the video and podcast. She gives us an introduction to the challenges of playing and mastering the kora, and how different it was from her violin studies. She talks about the challenges of immigrating to Canada from Hungary as a child, and then of her discovery of the kora.

Yosuke Kawasaki is a wonderful violinist and the Concertmaster of the National Arts Centre Orchestra Canada. He spoke about his experiences studying with the legendary Dorothy Delay, the inspiration he found in many of his peers growing up, and we talked about his role as a Concertmaster and his advice for young colleagues entering the profession (and that advice I feel applies to anyone in their life!). photo credit: Rémi Thériault

Interview with violinist Lynn Kuo E2 S2 Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman: In this wide-ranging discussion we covered a lot of topics, some of which include: Lynn’s online courses, injury prevention, performance anxiety, Lorand Fenyves, lessons learned and advice for musicians in a post-pandemic world.

Full transcript of E1 S2 Eva Slongo Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman, available both podcast and video: her journey from the Classical violin world to jazz, how she got started with her online courses, studying with Pierre Blanchard, Joan Renard, Didier Lockwood, her new album, balancing family life, challenges for women in jazz, her creative process.

Kirsty Money“And also the technique is different and it's something that I have to work on all the time. Because with a nyckelharpa, you don't want to crush the sound. Whereas when you're bowing on a violin, you want to put your arm weight from your back into the string so that you can get the string spinning.

Well, because you have all of these resonators on the nyckelharpa, you just want to start it resonating and then let it go. So it's like shooting arrows or something. So when you start, once I'm gliding on the string, you got to take the weight out. That was the hardest thing and still is the hardest thing for me in terms of it being just automatic, because especially if I'm playing going from violin to nyckelharpa, the bowing technique is quite different. The left hand I can figure out. Like when you're shifting up high on a violin, you got to have your fingering in a little plan to how you're going to get down, and it's the same thing. It's exactly same thing on the nyckelharpa, except you have keys and you got to get used to where your keys are on your instrument and muscle memory and all that. But the bowing is very different.”