In the wide world of music, it is not always easy to determine what actually constitutes the premier performance. The process of introducing works to a wider audience is by definition a complicated one, and rather frequently a composition disappears

Music publishing in France is intricately and unbreakably linked with the name Durand! It all started with Marie-Auguste Massacrié-Durand (1830-1909), a capable composer and organist. In fact, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire and was a classmate of César Franck

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 16 July 1782. The Austrian Emperor Joseph II was in the audience and famously said, “Too many notes my dear

The late great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould made two significant and highly-acclaimed recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the first in 1955 when he was just 22, the second a quarter of a century later in 1981 when he was nearing

Aram Khachaturian might easily be considered the poster child of Soviet realism in music. Joseph Stalin decreed that a composer in Soviet society had to be “an engineer of the human soul by writing music that communicates directly with the

Premiered at the Vienna Burgtheater on 11 July 1786, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf’s comic opera Doktor und Apotheker (The Pharmacist and the Doctor) was a resounding success. The contemporary press declared it “the one work among all new German operas

The great conductor and champion of contemporary music Serge Koussevitzky (1874-1951) certainly knew the value of a good marriage. Musically talented, he initially studied double bass and eventually joined the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra in 1894. He toured extensively with the

synergy syn·er·gy (sĭn’ər-jē) n. The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects. “those three minutes of perfection – when time stands still and the music