To watch Pinchas Zukerman perform, a scholar writes, “Gives the deceptive impression that violin playing is not really all that difficult. There is nothing labored, nothing studied about the way he handles the instrument, though, this inborn ability had to

In the summer of 1945, Kurt Weill received a commission for a series of short radio operas. Olin Downes, the music critic of The New York Times, and a businessman named Charles McArthur, envisioned a combination of the old English

As a solo pianist, Ernő Dohnányi (1877–1960) was usually compared to Liszt and was seen as the successor to that 19th-century virtuoso. As a composer of chamber music, however, he was usually associated with following the Brahmsian tradition. As a

In the early 1890s, Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) stepped away from his strongly Bohemian folksong–influenced orchestral music to write three overtures that he originally intended as a unified set entitled Nature, Life and Love. In the end, however, he published the

The great composer Dimitri Mitropoulos said in 1951, “I was profoundly shocked to read of the death of Arnold Schoenberg. He was one of the greatest geniuses of our time. He did for music in the twentieth century what Einstein

At the risk of stating the incredibly obvious, the violin is hard to play. Some players find that, in order to master a specific skill, it’s useful to strip it from a wider musical context and focus on the specific

Anton Arensky was born on 12 July 1861 in Novgorod, on the banks of Lake Ilmen. His father was a physician and played the cello, and his mother was said to have been a good pianist. Young Anton showed great

Operatic tenors enjoy a special status in the world of music. We all still remember the illustrious Enrico Caruso, Beniamino Gigli, and Richard Tauber from the first half of the twentieth century. However, as a critic wrote, “the most versatile