On 27 July 2024, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Ferruccio Busoni’s (1866-1924) death. At the time of his passing, he was widely remembered as a pianist with legendary technique, “but his activities as composer and author usually received only

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) strongly resisted experimental music trends during the 1920s. Actually, he has frequently been compared to Brahms, who was also unaffected by the fashions and dictates of his time. Both, in fact, continued to compose expressive, lyrical music

After the death of his mother in September 1902 and frustration at the lack of progress on his Second Symphony, Edward Elgar and his wife decamped from their small, rented cottage near Malvern and retreated to the Italian Riviera in

For all that the world assumes a frantic Christmas cheer, there remain those corners of the world where loneliness and cold seem to rule. If Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin is a song cycle of spring and summer, albeit with a

Although she and her talents were central to the work of her husband and creative partner Giacomo Rossini, there is no English language biography of Isabella Colbran. We want to change that. So consider this a basic overview of her

Artur Schnabel (1882-1951) is best known for the first recording of the complete cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas, which he issued between 1932 and 1935. He was never a virtuoso pianist but engaged with every nuance of meaning in the

Beethoven’s orchestra in 1804, when he conducted the first performance of his Symphony No. 3, and Mahler’s orchestra a century later were very different. Developments in string technology, in brass and woodwind instrument construction, and in the very sound and

The viola d’amore (or viol of love) is a violin with a difference. Instead of the usual 4 strings as on the violin, it can have up to 14 strings – seven bowed and seven that are ‘sympathetic’ strings, i.e.,