In its 30th year, the 2014 Lufthansa Festival presented a variety of music heard in Britain during the early 18th century under the reign of the Georgian dynasty. There were many favourites on offer, such as Handel’s Coronation Anthems, Ode

Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht op.4 La Nuit transfigurée / Transfigured Night V. Adagio (molto tranquillo) From Berg: Lyric Suite / Schoenberg: Transfigured Night (2014) Released by Harmonia Mundi Schoenberg: Transfigured Night op.4The First World War, that crucible of every kind of

It’s graduation season and we start to hear music for ceremonies. At my high school graduation, the concert band played a bit of Wagner: ‘Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral’ from Lohengrin. It was wonderful music, but when you’d repeated it

Do you imagine that social climbing is a modern day phenomenon? Think again! Here’s a piece that humorously illustrates this societal failing— Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme Op. 60 by Richard Strauss. It was written between 1911 and 1917 and is a

Elektra (1909), proved crucial to Strauss’s later development as a composer of opera, since it marked the beginning of his collaboration with the young Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. This tale of multiple murder and bitter vengeance is musically and

When you look at the output of composer and conductor Carl Davis, you get a wonderful overview of the many ways that a classical orchestra can take on the pop repertoire. There are orchestral renderings of the music from the

Throughout his life, Richard Strauss surrounded himself with beautiful women!

We think of instruments as being so well-established (look at any orchestra), that we don’t think about the instruments that were there and are now gone, or have been replaced with something else, or just changed into something else.