As a visual artist, I find great inspiration in the varied disciplines of creativity. When I was first introduced to the renowned cellist Jacqueline du Pré, my soul was electrified by her virtuosity and sensitivity.

Every night my mother would put us to bed to classical music, my younger brother would fall asleep instantly, but I was different and I couldn't sleep until the record was finished. I would secretly leave my room and stand in front of the mirror that was in the long corridor next to my room and I would dance and pretend I was Montserrat Caballé in La Traviata.

Opera is not just for fuddy-duddies, elitists and snobs. Fact.

If you think Tarantino is extreme, read any story about Greek Mythology. It makes him look like a schoolboy who wrote a fairy tale that went wrong. The Greeks did it better - and bloodier. Fathers devouring their sons, mothers murdering their loved sons just to avenge their ex-partner. There is no such thing as a happy ending in the ancient Greeks.

In Les Miserables, two of the main characters just... well, die. No particular reason - it's just convenient to the plot. Something unnamed and mysterious. Ordained by God, perhaps. But fatal. And all this happens in the context of abject misery (Ah! Okay, now I get the reason it's called that...).

Whilst working on this project, I've found opera to be quite similar to pop music, especially within the subject matter it covers. Giacomo Puccini's, La Rondine, which we're reinterpreting, is a case in point encapsulating many types of love, and a lot of pop music involves that.

My eye was caught by the largest of these graves, at the very bottom, the name 'Luciano Pavarotti', his date of birth and date of death. Gifts left in front of it, small toys and sealed letters. With the cameras pointed at us, Charlotte and I spoke about the great man and what it was like to be at this monumental site in his hometown... I almost cried.

In the winter of 2010 I exited a relationship that ended messily, though thankfully not violently. Well, not outwardly violently. It was during this relationship and the troubles that it went through, that I started self-harming.

For most of the cast in the operatic romcom First Night, a tale of lust, deception and romantic entanglement set to a Mozart soundtrack, it wasn't jus...

In recent times classical music has been referred to as dead. I disagree.

There is nothing better than a nerdy lunch with one of the world's greatest bass singers discussing Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. Well, lucky for...

After last night's Dr Dee, a new opera created by Damon Albarn and director Rufus Norris at the English National Opera, I began thinking over my own, personal, verdict.

It seems to me that if a person has no knowledge or experience of opera at all, we can send them off to see pretty much anything at all that we know to be beautiful, dramatic and engaging. Why might a novice not enjoy Montemezzi's L'amore dei tre Re?

A firestorm has erupted in the opera world over what has been called "censorship" by the Metropolitan Opera House of the magazine Opera News

The BBC Proms 2012 is now open for booking but don't fret if you are still deciding, here is some guidance from Conductor Martyn Brabbins and Composer Emily Howard and their personal highlights; they both feature in this year's proms season.

I am not entirely sure whether to be pleased or depressed that the latest Britain's Got Talent sensation, Jonathan and Charlotte, are becoming such a phenomenon. On the one hand, it partially proves the theory that there is an enormous untapped appetite for opera (or operatic-like noises) in the UK.

So we didn't win in our category at the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards (Best Concert or Festival Series). Somebody else won it.