(cover image by Celia Spenard-Ko) It’s July again, and you know what that means. Actually, you probably don’t. Just another series, not really any different from all the other stuff I do, except that I pick themes along a different line. … Continue reading Petite Piano Pieces
(cover image by Rob Potvin) In the past few years, I’ve done a number of this type of series, and it seems they spiral out of control as I find more and more outstanding music. In 2016, we saw the … Continue reading The French Symphony
(cover image by Freddie Marriage) Unfortunately, no one can know all there is about everything. I’m at least a little ashamed to admit the degree of my unfamiliarity with, say, most of the symphonies and string quartets of Haydn, or Mozart (but … Continue reading Editor’s Choice: A New Series
(cover image by Pasi Jormalainen) The final feature of the year, the Finnish symphony series, finally! It’s a contrast to the two English-speaking symphony series we did this year, and I guess kind of a callback to the end of … Continue reading The Finnish Symphony
or The American Symphony: a Series I’ve been wanting to use that line for so long, and I am positive someone’s used it somewhere but I haven’t even bothered looking because I’m so proud I thought of it. In any case, … Continue reading America’s Next Top Mahler
I’ve spoken before about how difficult it is for me to explore and begin to enjoy opera the way I listen to most other music. For me, as for most people, it’s an auditory experience, and I’ll listen to music while I’m … Continue reading 20th Century Opera: a series
This is finally happening. There was a discussion I read online recently about countries or cultures ‘pulling their weight’ or not in classical music relative to the country’s international/historical influence and how the renown of their classical musicians is in … Continue reading Series: The English Symphony
It’s a beautiful instrument. It sings and soars and highlights some of the most spine-tingling, heroic, tragic, powerful, epic, angelic moments in the pieces that we as classical music audiences love and adore. And I couldn’t find an image of … Continue reading Series: The Horn
In the past, we’ve done series about different instruments (and another one is queued up), and I’ve spoken before about the difficulty of warming up to and appreciating opera the way I am currently used to listening to music, but … Continue reading The Human Voice
Danish music! I’ll try not to make any comparisons, but I was just stunned by the volume and quality of Swedish music over the summer, preparing for September’s Swedish Symphony Series (awesome alliteration!), and this month, we’re doing Danish. There … Continue reading Danish December: a series
Last month marked three years that I’ve been writing in this space (the past year powered by WordPress, and previous years by other, inferior platforms), and that’s totaled more than 600 articles, more than half of which are ‘music posts’ or articles about … Continue reading New November: a series
It has been a good long while since we’ve done any piano stuff, but it’s actually been longer since last year’s Russian Symphony 2015 series that lasted three whole months. Granted, in those three months, we covered 20 symphonies, but at … Continue reading Russian Piano 2016: a series
(for all the posts that were in this series, click here) This one has been brewing for some time. So many series… but I feel like it’s a good way to organize works into a little package, a timeline that … Continue reading September’s Swedish Symphony Series 2016
If you’ve read this blog for any length of time (as in, any more than about twice), you’ll know I’m a sucker for a good series. I try to approach things in an organized, logical manner, so I like to … Continue reading Various Violin Virtuosity
There are so many string quartets… The obvious contributors: Haydn has 68 numbered quartets Mozart has 23 Beethoven has 16 numbered quartets (and the Große Fuge) But that’s not all. There are composers the average classical music listener (including myself) has … Continue reading String Quartet Series
This article is in preparation for a concert I’ll be attending tomorrow and some things I got to thinking about while preparing to think about writing the article about said concert that’ll be posted in the next few days. Anyway, … Continue reading Concerts for Newcomers
The Russian Coat of Arms from around the time of the earliest of the symphonies we’ll be talking about We’ve been doing lots of German stuff this year. Lots. If you think of music like you think of language families … Continue reading The Russian Symphony: A Series
I have come to love string quartets. It seems this group of four instruments has the perfect balance of succinct compactness, clarity, cohesion, and range of expression. There are times when a quartet sounds perfectly like a quartet, with four … Continue reading Some 20th Century String Quartets: A small series
performed by Idil Biret from her Chopin box set, or equally excellently below, by Vladimir Ashkenazy Today, we begin with a new composer. Could there be a more logical choice? I suppose there’s Schubert, but he didn’t make it this … Continue reading Chopin Rondo in Cm, op. 1
but piano, this time. My previous efforts with Mozart focused solely on his juvenile symphonies, the ones he wrote before he would have even been old enough to get a driver’s license, had that been a thing then. And it … Continue reading Much More Mozart
For the next few weeks, we’ll be taking the chance to visit a few symphonies that didn’t get inclusion into our rather large German(ic) Symphony series at the end of last year. Obviously not everything could be included in that, and there was a rather specific train of thought I was working on for it, so some really good candidates were excluded. We’ll be adding to that a bit with a slightly smaller (by half) and not so narrative-like series starting this week.I’m excited about this one. The first and last in the series are really some of my absolute … Continue reading Mini German: A four-part series
Fugue for Thought 