If you’d like to find out more about the Shakespeare and Music Group, please visit shakespeareandmusic.wordpress.com and @shakesmus on Twitter.
Episode 1

In the first episode of 'Sounds and Sweet Airs', Michael Graham talks to the Chair of the Shakespeare and Music Study Group, Michelle Assay, about the formation of the group, its current activities, and her long-term vision. They also discuss Michelle’s fascinating personal history with Shakespeare, and her research into Soviet and Post-Soviet Shakespeare music, including: what Shakespeare means to Russians and Russian composers; encounters with Shakespeare in Georgia; and whether Stalin really did try to ban Hamlet...
00:06:14: Introducing the group
00:17:28: The personal and the universal
00:21:59: Hamlet or Don Quixote?
00:34:46: Satellites
00:38:07: "Stalin banned Hamlet is a nice story"
00:50:38: Where to start?
00:56:42: First encounters with Hamlet in Tehran
Michelle Assay was born in Tehran and trained in piano performance at the Tchaikovsky Academy in Kiev and at the Satie Conservatoire in Paris. She is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield, working on the project ‘Shakespeare and Censorship in Soviet/Post-Soviet Music, Film and Theatre’. She obtained her PhD from the Universities of Sorbonne and Sheffield and is preparing her PhD dissertation, ‘Hamlet in the Stalin era’, for publication by Routledge. She is the founder and chair of international research groups on ‘Shakespeare and Music’ and ‘Shakespeare in Central and Eastern Europe’. Alongside publications in this area, she is the co-author of a major life-and-work study of Mieczysław Weinberg for Toccata Press, has published on Carl Nielsen and is on the editorial board of Carl Nielsen Studies. She continues to appear in concert as a solo and chamber pianist and is a reviewer and writer for the Gramophone.