aka Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy “Musical prodigies … are probably no longer so rare; but what this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early … Continue reading Influential People: Felix Mendelssohn
In case you didn’t realize, this topic is nothing I can speak about from personal experience, nor is it anything I really know much about. It is also an incredibly large, complicated, and even sensitive topic, about a very dark … Continue reading Music in the Soviet Era
performed by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Bernard Haitink “although it is in many ways very immature, yet fundamentally it has more substance and is better than any of my other more mature works.” So, here we are at arguably … Continue reading Tchaikovsky Symphony no. 1, op. 13, ‘Winter Dreams’
Franz Liszt: where does one begin? Handsome chap, too Most people know him as the frighteningly virtuosic virtuoso pianist born in 1811, the year after Chopin and Schumann, he himself being one of the most influential performers/composers of the 19th … Continue reading Influential People: Franz Liszt
…unlike Wagner, Alkan did not seek to refashion the world through opera; nor, like Berlioz, to dazzle the crowds by putting orchestral music at the service of literary expression; nor even, as with Chopin or Liszt, to extend the field … Continue reading Charles-Valentin Alkan: Souvenirs: Trois Morceaux dans le genre pathétique, op. 15
He couldn’t stop himself. Is this the same image I used last time? While Brahms was perhaps compulsive about perfecting something before he published it, agonizing for ages over a work (his first symphony took something like two decades), Bruckner … Continue reading The Bruckner Problem
The picture that everyone knows of the composer who looks like George Washington He excelled in every musical genre… He is familiarly known as the ‘father of the symphony’ and could with greater justice be thus regarded for the … Continue reading Influential People: Franz Josef Haydn
Fugue for Thought 