As soon as Robert and Clara Schumann got married on 12 September 1840, they confided their most intimate thoughts and ideas to a shared diary. Topics ranged from mundane household matters to subjects of a rather intimate private nature, like

Helen of Sparta was considered the most beautiful woman in the world. Sadly, she was married to a drab, conceited and seriously overweight king. When her lover Paris—who turns out to be the Prince of Troy—couldn’t take it any longer,

During its days of largest expansion and influence in the 17th century, the Ottoman Empire controlled much of Southeastern Europe, the Middle East and Northern Africa. Remaining a constant military threat to Central Europe over several centuries, Turkish troops famously

Talk about off and running. The Manila-based Ripieno Ensemble only formally launched in January, and its debut performance in February featured an ambitious repertoire: the works of modern-day music stalwarts Schoenberg and Webern as well as those of contemporary Philippine

Today, the idea of a castrato singer is a bit embarrassing. For our hyper-masculine world (would you like muscles on that?), the idea of a male singer who can only sing at a soprano pitch just seems wrong.

Sometimes we don’t want the brightly lilting tunes of a flute or the ecstatic runs of a violin or piano – our mood wants something slower, something sadder, something for the dark hours. Music not for melancholy but for introspection.

The ancients described the sound of the Aeolian harp as “music played without human hands.” As such, Romantic poets considered the instrument a source of natural and divine inspiration. Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes in his The Eolian Harp, of 1795:

An ancient Russian proverb states, “You cannot hunt two hares at the same time.” Sounds pretty self-explanatory to me, but Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin (1833-1887) disagreed! In musical circles, Borodin (1833-1887) is primarily known for his symphonies, the opera Prince Igor,