Depending on your location, there might already be a touch of frost in the air. Days might be getting shorter and nights much darker and longer. But whatever your geographic location, you will undoubtedly have noticed that Christmas is once

Piano concerto I. Preludium: Andante con moto From Kilar: Koscielec 1909 / Piano Concerto / Bogurodzica / Exodus (Malicki, Warsaw Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra, Wit) (2002) Released by CD Accord Kilar: Piano concerto – I. Preludium: Andante con motoWojciech Kilar

Gustav Holst is best known for a single work: The Planets. A unique symphonic work, it has little precedent in the orchestral literature. It might be compared to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition or even Elgar’s Engima Variations, but both

When Janne Sibelius and Aino Järnefelt gazed at each other across a family dinner, love was definitely in the air. “My eyes never left you,” Sibelius wrote later, and her brother Arvid loudly proclaimed, “Don’t look at my sister like

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was one of the few composers to take on the Ave Maria multiple times. His own religious interests would have guided him to the Ave Maria text, and when he made it his own, he carries us

In the opera Don Giovanni, there’s a particularly cruel scene where the Donna Elvira, meeting Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello, has to hear how she is just one of a large number of women that the Don has seduced. In the

Lush forests and forbidding mountains covered in deep snow, together with sweet smells of roasting chestnuts and mulled wines inescapably conjure up images of Christmas time. The only thing missing in this idyllic Victorian winter scene is the rhythmic ringing

The American West was a unique inspiration for a number of artists, but it is in the work of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe that a new eye was cast on the broad horizons. Her three watercolors from 1917, Light