Hoping to gain financial independence, Richard Wagner was eager to establish an annual music festival that would realize his particular vision of music and theatre. Initially he contemplated Munich, but his extravagant and scandalous behavior in that city caused him

The other day I was looking through the earliest articles written for my blog. Some of my early writing is horribly self-conscious, and evidently written with little expectation of anyone actually reading it. But however much this “juvenilia” may make

24 July 1983 marked the 200th birthday of Simón Bolívar, known around South America as “El Libertador.” The Venezuelan military and political leader played a significant role in the establishment of Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Panama as sovereign

We’ve all heard of musical chairs, a game of elimination involving players, chairs, and music. With one fewer chair than players, when the music stops the player who fails to sit on a chair is eliminated. A chair is then

On 22 July 1864 Clara Schumann and conductor Hermann Levi played through a piano sonata for two pianos by Johannes Brahms. Clara was overwhelmed by the music’s grandeur, and wrote to the composer. “The work is splendid, but it cannot

If I had a pound for every time a student said this in a lesson, I’d be a rich woman by now! We’ve all heard it, and I know I’ve been guilty of saying it myself occasionally at piano lessons

Music students, amateurs, and professionals, love to attend summer festivals. We look forward all year to the challenging and diverse repertoire, playing with different colleagues, for new teachers, or playing chamber music, in picturesque settings. Think Verbier, Aspen, Tanglewood, Ljubljana.

In spite of their huge age gap, Chinese pianist Lang Lang and Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa share one thing in common — they were both born in Shenyang, China. Maestro Ozawa was born in September 1935, his parents being merchants