Know Your Composer
“The opening movement of the Sonata [No. 21] in B-flat Major goes beyond analysis,” writes the pianist Stephen Hough. “It is one of those occasions when the pen has to be set down on the desk, the body rested against the back of a chair, and a listener’s whole
Know Your Composer
By placing Ludwig van B. on a musical pedestal we tend to forget that he was surrounded by a whole host of talented composers and musicians who competed for his audience. And as we all know, Beethoven was a difficult person to get along with at the best of times,
Know Your Composer
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) seems to sneak up on me in the unlikeliest of places. I‘m not much of a Netflixer, and tend to watch episodes of series very erratically, often with weeks to months in between. One such series is ‘Outlander’, based on the eponymous historical fiction novel
Know Your Composer
Take a moment and consider the most evocative excerpts from John Williams’ Star Wars film scores, the hypnotic, meditative tones of electronic ambient music, and the late twentieth century pop song’s formulaic concluding “fade out.” It could be argued that all were vaguely anticipated by Gustav Holst’s seven-movement
Know Your Composer
George V, alongside Queen Mary, was crowned King of the United Kingdom, the British Dominions, and Emperor of India at Westminster Abbey on 22 June 1911. It had already been announced that the royal couple would travel to India to attend the Durbar, an Indian imperial style mass assembly organized
Know Your Composer
We take a look at how Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, also known as the G minor Symphony—which offers the listener moments of jubilation and darkness, enigma and eloquence—has been interpreted over the years. Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor, one of his most critically acclaimed
Know Your Composer
Franz Schubert composed his set of six German Dances in October 1824 for his piano student Countess Caroline Esterházy. Everybody knew that Schubert was deeply in love with his 18-year old student, and a number of compositions were the direct result of his infatuation. The manuscript of the German Dances
Know Your Composer
Nobody composed variations like Austrian composer Franz Schubert! An undisputed master of the genre, his variations on his own melodies became a fascinating combination of formal innovation and musical poetics. Peeling away layer upon layer of significance and meaning, Schubert bathes his melodies in unexpected and radiant colors. In 1824
Know Your Composer
Haunting or bewitching are words that come to mind to the hundreds of thousands of those who have experienced Samuel Barber’s 1936 Adagio for Strings. Or the countless millions whose lives have been unwittingly changed by eight minutes of music of which they could not name composer or title.
Know Your Composer
In all, the remarkable collection of Schubert’s Lieder transcriptions by Franz Liszt totalled 58 songs. Liszt first handed twelve of these piano transcriptions to a Viennese publisher in 1838 and his concluding efforts emerged 10 years later in 1848. It is indeed interesting that Liszt spent an entire decade
Know Your Composer
In the good old pre-pandemic days (remember them?), we at Child’s Play would have been resting during the festive season after all the hard work put into our annual Christmas concert earlier in the month of December. One of those concerts featured an arrangement for strings of ‘Silvesterlied’ or
Know Your Composer
One day in 1979, the chief music critic at the San Francisco Examiner, Michael Walsh, who had the desk next to mine, sidled over and handed me the album of a new musical, Sweeney Todd. ‘It’s actually an opera’, he whispered conspiratorially, ‘but don’t tell anyone’. When I