When we truly respect someone’s intellect, our first instinct is to treat them with the utmost reverence: to place them on a pedestal and see them as somehow more than human. With composers we admire, especially those well cemented in

Robert Blocker, Dean of the Yale School of Music from 1995 to 2023, is an internationally acclaimed concert pianist. He asked his faculty friends and colleagues for contemporary character pieces and was rewarded with an outstanding collection of works by

“The Father of Haydn’s Style” In 2025, we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the passing of the highly influential Italian composer Giovanni Battista Sammartini (1700-1775). Sammartini was one of the foremost composers of the 18th century and a key figure

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) took the fairy-tale play by Alexander Ostrovsky as the basis for his incidental music production of The Snow Maiden. The Snow Maiden emerges from the forest at exactly the wrong time: winter is fading, and spring

Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, born on 5 January 1920 near the town of Brescia, Italy, was renowned for his impeccable technique, precision, and expressive restraint. A recluse and perfectionist, Michelangeli was a master of both technical virtuosity and emotional

The Bach family was happily settled in Weimar. Maria Barbara Bach was taking care of the household and was certainly busy raising their precocious daughter Catharina Dorothea. Johann Sebastian, in the meantime, continued his duties in the service of Duke

Winter sports are so different from summer sports – you can fly through the air on your skies, slide down the icy hill on your sledge, or just silently glide through the snowy forest on your cross-country skies. Let’s see

Isolated from the surrounding carnage of WWI, Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) began to synthesise elements of German Romanticism and Eastern Exoticism through an exploration of Greek mythical subject matters and concepts from the French fin de siècle of Debussy and Ravel.