“I have also, for practice,” Wolfgang Amadeus writes to his father from Mannheim, “arranged the air ‘Non so d’onde viene’ which has been so charmingly composed by Bach. Just because I know that of Bach so well, and it pleases

What do you call the massacre of thousands of Huguenot Protestants by Catholic forces on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572? In artistic terms, you’d have to call it the most successful opera of the 19th century. When Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots premiered

“There isn’t a day when I sit down to play the piano that I don’t think of him, in my mind hearing what he said when I played certain pieces” – Sarah Beth Briggs, British concert pianist

“perhaps the most impassioned music I have ever written.”Robert Schumann writing to Clara Wieck, March 1838 Never one for disguising his emotions, Robert Schumann wore his heart on his sleeve and his music reflects his joy at being alive –

Spanish composers didn’t have what other European countries had: a central court. They did have the Holy Roman Emperor, in the form of Charles V and later, his son, Philip II, but those rulers preferred to hire musicians from the

Making her first appearance at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in March, organist Riyehee Hong is looking forward to bringing a wealth of Spanish and European organ music to a new audience. The appearance of an organist in a general

Although Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz is frequently portrayed as the liberation of German cultures from foreign influences, we should not forget that a “veritable Freischütz mania flooded all England.” Productions of the opera opened in London in

If you hang around in the arts, then you hang around with lots of kinds of artists – musicians don’t just pal around with other musicians but add all kinds of artists into their circles. Some of these circles, such