Music is powerful. It can make us smile, laugh and cry. It gives us something to enjoy or think about while we wait for the bus. It makes us want to dance. It gives us food for thought. It can

XI. Frühlingstraum From Schubert: Wintereisse / Matthias Goerne’s Schubert Edition 9 (2014) Released by Harmonia Mundi Schubert: Wintereisse – XI. FrühlingstraumThis Winterreise ends Matthias Goerne’s series of Schubert lieder recordings. Here everything is tenser, more urgent, more harrowing. At once

Pianist, Scholar and Composer When Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev (1856-1915) attended the funeral of his student Alexander Scriabin in 1915, he caught a rather severe flu. Instead of taking proper medicine and rest, he continued to resist the virus and persisted

Madrigals in elevated style formed the basis of various musical entertainments during the late Italian Renaissance. Before the advent of opera, composers habitually turned to the dramatic madrigal in an effort to create new musico-dramatic forms. Among the most popular

His teacher Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky called Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev “the greatest master of counterpoint in Russia; I am not even sure there is his equal in the West.” And his student Sergei Rachmaninoff, described Taneyev as “a master composer, the

Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev (1856-1915) was a rather unusual character! Well into adulthood, he lived with his beloved nanny Pelageya Vassilievna Ivanovna. He abhorred alcohol and was a militant non-smoker; making his friends smoke at the open kitchen window in clear

Believe it or not, the dictionaries and most prominent reference books of 1878 did not have a word to identify what we now think of as abstract art. The best anybody could do at the time was to compare paintings

Joseph Haydn was famous for his pranks! When he was a choirboy at St. Stephen’s cathedral in Vienna in 1749, he decided to test the sharpness of a new pair of scissors by snipping off the pigtail of one of