David Fanning is Professor Emeritus at the University of Manchester, and Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto. Author of books and articles on Shostakovich, Weinberg, Nielsen, and the 20th-century symphonic tradition, he is also prominent as a public musicologist, reviewer for Gramophone and writer of programme and liner notes. As a pianist he was for many years chamber-music partner of the Lindsay String Quartet and Quatuor Danel. Michelle Assay is the principal investigator of the Marie Curie/UK Research and Innovation-funded project, ‘Women and Western Art Music in Iran’, hosted at King’s College London and the University of Toronto, in partnership with UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage centre in France. Born in Tehran, she holds a PhD from the Sorbonne and University of Sheffield, with a dissertation on Hamlet in Stalin’s Russia, which she is currently preparing for publication by Routledge. She is the author of several prize-winning publications on Shakespeare’s Russian and Soviet afterlife. Michelle is chair and founder of the Shakespeare and Music Study Group, and of the GWAM (Global Western Art Music) network. She appears on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and is a regular contributor to Gramophone magazine.