About The Welsh Rostrum

Why that sentence comes first

This domain was previously the conductor's own official website, and a large number of the links still pointing at it say so in as many words. Anyone who follows one of those links has good reason to think they have reached him. They have not. Nothing on this site is written by him, approved by him or connected to him, and the statement stands at the head of every page as well as here.

There is no way to contact him here

The site carries no email address, no telephone number, no postal address, no contact form and no enquiry or booking language, and it never will. That is deliberate. A site that looks like a route to a person, on a domain that used to be that person's own, is a site pretending to be an office. Anyone who needs to reach a working musician should go through the organisations that engage them.

Where the facts come from

Everything stated about Owain Arwel Hughes is taken from the public record: reference entries, the artist pages published by the record labels he recorded for, the catalogues of those recordings, and contemporary news reporting. The list of sources is held with the site and the same short list is behind every biographical page.

What is deliberately absent is as important. There is nothing here about his family, his home, his health or his private life; those things are findable and they are not the subject. There is no summary or quotation of his 2012 autobiography beyond naming it as a book that exists, because it is in copyright and because it is written in a first person that this site must never borrow. There is no photograph of him, and in fact no photograph of any conductor anywhere on the site, because on this domain a picture of a conductor would be read as a picture of him.

What the site does not do

• It does not sell or list tickets, and it publishes no concert diary. Where it describes a hall or a festival, it describes what the thing is, not what is on this week.
• It does not reproduce sleeve art, programme notes, photographs or recordings.
• It does not represent, book or speak for any musician or organisation named on it.
• It does not print song lyrics, including the words of the Welsh national anthem, which it describes instead.

The pictures

Every photograph on the site is a real photograph of a hall, an object or a place, screened to a coarse halftone in one ink the way an uncoated concert programme reproduces a picture. No identifiable person appears in any of them.