Moira Bennett casts her perceptive, wry and amused eye over a childhood and adolescence in South Africa and her years raising sponsorship for the Aldeburgh Festival, the Barbican Centre and the London Symphony Orchestra. In her early fifties, Moira Bennett was widowed with a school-age son and in need of a job. With virtually no previous working experience but full of energy and determination, she found herself working at the Britten-Pears Schoolat Snape, helping to run masterclasses for young professional musicians studying with artists such as Peter Pears, Galina Vishnevskaya, Mstislav Rostropovich, Hugues Cuenod and William Pleeth. Her gift for arts administration - understanding the needs of performers and audiences - was soon to become highly valued at Aldeburgh, as she became the Registrar at the Britten-Pears School and went on to create the post of Development Director in the early days ofcommercial sponsorship of the arts. She was later invited to take on a similar role at the Barbican Centre, supporting a series of international arts festivals, before going on to work with the London Symphony Orchestra. In 2012 the Bittern Press published Moira Bennett's history of the Britten-Pears School, Making Musicians, which Classical Music magazine made one its Books of the Year. Now in her early nineties, Moira Bennett has written an extraordinary autobiography, casting an astute eye over her childhood and adolescence in South Africa, the impact of the Second World War and the Apartheid years on the country, and her second, 'unexpected', life in the arts.

An insider's perspective on forty years of the Britten-Pears School, generously illustrated and with quotations from the eminent staff and their students - many of whom are now internationally famous. Moira Bennett worked at the Britten-Pears School in its hectic heyday in the 1980s. She charts its forty-year history, embodying its founders' initial vision of a bridge between conservatory and career for gifted young musicians,from ad hoc classes in a grainstore at Snape, to an annual calendar of non-stop courses for singers, string players and ensembles in its own building and fully staged operas in the Maltings, to its current incarnation as the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme. Some of the most eminent teachers from Europe, the United States and beyond have come to teach at Snape. These include founder-director Peter Pears, Hans Hotter, Joan Sutherland, Galina Vishnevskaya, Jacqueline du Pre, Mitsuko Uchida, Mstislav Rostropovich, Ton Koopman, and members of the Amadeus Quartet. This authoritative and anecdotal historical survey of the work of the School is generously illustrated and studded withquotations from many faculty members and former students.