(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 Christin Hume) Apologies in no particular order to: Charles-Marie Widor Jacques Ibert Rameau Cécile Chaminade Tristan Murail André Jolivet Pierre Capdeveille Jean Rivier Francis Poulenc Andre Gedalge Paul Le Flem Yves Ramette Henri Sauguet …among many others, … Continue reading The French Symphony in Review
(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
See? It’s not all about Sibelius. (cover image by Luca Bravo) You can find the entire series (in reverse chronological order) here. I’m guessing that for any of you readers who wouldn’t consider yourselves to be diligent students of classical … Continue reading The Finnish Symphony in Review
(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
(cover image by Ian Baldwin) I started this (last) month’s series by talking about how difficult it was for me to appreciate and discover opera the way I listen to music (headphones, no visuals, no subtitles, etc.), but I discovered … Continue reading A Month of Opera in Review
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
And here we are again at the end of another month of marvelous music. I feel like if I could get around to doing more of these series for more individual nations/cultures, there would be so many gems to discover. … Continue reading Danish December: wrap-up
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
So much Swedish music! There were a few challenges in preparing this series. At the beginning, as I said in the introduction, there were a few names that were responsible for deciding to do this series to begin with. I’d … Continue reading The Swedish Series: a wrap-up
(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
There isn’t much to say, maybe, about August’s line-up. There was quite a variety of influences peppered throughout the four composers featured this month, from Ravel’s earliest work and influence from Debussy to his later fascination with jazz and then … Continue reading Various Violin Virtuosity: A wrap-up
Needless to repeat, but I shall, that none of my series are comprehensive; there’s no way they can be. The blog as an entire entity is not comprehensive. But I think in this challenging and intense month of listening and writing (the … Continue reading Darmstadt 2016: A Review
I used to have ‘thoughts’ articles a lot more often than I do now. Concert reviews would be every Tuesday, but now they’re the evening of (or a day or two after) the concert, and I’m taking on too much … Continue reading Wrap-up to a Series?
Fugue for Thought 