We start the year with Spring, even though any year starts in the throes of Winter, be it the frosty Winter of the Northern Hemisphere, or the burning Winter of the Southern Hemisphere. Spring is awakening, is renewal, is a

Commissioned by the Associated Music Publishers in New York, Alexander Tcherepnin premiered his second symphony in Chicago on 20 March 1952. It took Tcherepnin a long while to finish the composition, as he labored on the orchestration for the better

On 20 March 1784, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sent his father the famous list of subscribers who paid an entrance fee of six gulden for three concerts at the Trattnerhof. “Here you have the list of all my subscribers,” he writes,

Whether we like it or not, Hector Berlioz is primarily associated with a single composition. Everybody knows his Symphonie Fantastique, but his religious works, the dramatic legends, his songs and even his operas are rarely scheduled for performance, and they

Ever since Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) fictionally poisoned Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, he has gotten some seriously bad press. But as we know all too well, factual information and historical fact have never stood in the way of Hollywood telling a good

Charles Burney (1726-1814) took on the three roles of music historian, composer, and musician. His first music books, The Present State of Music in France and Italy… (London, 1771) and The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and

We are so used to attending concerts in specially-designed large halls that it is easy to forget that until about 1850, most music was experienced in people’s homes, churches, small intimate venues or ‘salons’. The Salon Concert was particularly popular

Haunted by the memory of Julietta, a girl he once spied singing from her window in a seaside holiday town, the Parisian bookseller Michel searches for her in his dreams. He meets a number of characters in increasingly bizarre encounters