March, 2014

43 Posts
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Spies and Music
With all the news these days of computer spies, we’d thought we’d look at the historical problem of musical spies. We don’t mean stealing composers’ musical ideas, but the ways in which, over the centuries, music and composers have entered
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Mozart, Beethoven & Schubert recital
Schubert: Sonata in B flat major, D960 IV. Allegro ma non troppo – Presto From Mozart, Beethoven & Schubert recital (2013) Released by Semaphore Schubert: Sonata in B flat major, D960 – IV. Allegro ma non troppo – PrestoDiscover Sarah
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The Supernatural in Music
III. Dies Irae: The Dance of Death
The ‘Dies Irae’ (Day of Wrath) was a poem written to be used in the Requiem Mass of the Roman Catholic Church and comes from a Latin hymn dating from the thirteenth century. As you say the Latin aloud, you
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I Want to Be in America
One of the most interesting songs about the United States comes in the voice of embattled immigrants, the Puerto Ricans who inhabit Leonard Bernstein’s 1957 musical West Side Story. The song ‘America,’ in the original Broadway production, contrasts an idealized
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In touch with Melody Eötvös
Hailed as “the city’s most innovative music experience” by the Financial Times, the Intimacy of Creativity, founded by Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng, begins its fourth cycle this April, to bring together internationally acclaimed performers and composers for creative dialogue and
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What If You Had 12 Trumpets?
Leoš Janáček Sinfonietta
What if you had not 2 or 3 trumpets, the normal complement for an orchestra, but 12 trumpets? Well, then you’d write the Sinfonietta. The Sinfonietta, completed in 1926, was the last orchestral work by Czech composer Leoš Janáček. Now
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Sinking into the Pasture
Concertgebouw Amsterdam
The Royal Concertgebouw concert hall in Amsterdam is one of the finest performing venues in the world. At the time of construction, which started in 1883 in a pasture outside the city limits, the science of acoustics was not yet
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The Piano Has the Last Word
Before Schubert and Schumann, the role of the piano in lied performances was just as a general support – the vocal line was the star and the piano the nearly invisible support. With Schubert, the ultimate lieder composer, and Schumann,
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