Recently I heard Dario Brignoli—principal clarinet of Chicago’s Grant Park Orchestra and the Tucson Symphony Orchestra—introduce a famous clarinet solo by Verdi before performing it. He mentioned that the solo was written for Ernesto Cavallini, “the Paganini of the clarinet.”

Not every composer targeted by the Nazis died in the Holocaust. The five men on this list got out before it was too late. Every one of their escape stories was dramatic. One sent a coded telegram to his wife;

Many pieces of music have names that, on deeper reflection, are really oxymorons: the two words contradict each other. Some familiar oxymorons include jumbo shrimp, deafening silence, awfully good, original copy, and bittersweet, giving us a way to express the

In the 2025–2026 season, Spanish early music master Jordi Savall and his longtime collaborator Luca Guglielmi completed a new performance version of Mozart’s famous unfinished masterpiece, the Mass in C minor (K. 427), and toured it across Europe. This article

Many great composers had sisters, and those sisters shaped them more than most biographies say. They taught them piano, nursed them through fatal illness, and carried their family’s finances. Some of these women were musicians themselves. Others were nuns, teachers,

George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (arr. R. Hekkema for reed quintet): Tempo I (Calefax Reed Quintet) Today, I’d like to introduce you to a musical movement from the late 1950s and early 1960s that you may simply never have heard

I learned ensemble playing through the euphonium. At Xinghai Conservatory of Music, breath, intonation and rhythm were daily disciplines, but the larger lesson was how to place one sound inside many others. A euphonium line can support the bass, answer

The modern violin is around 500 years old, and over that time, an endless number of myths and misunderstandings have sprung up around it. The violin’s greatest player was in league with the devil. Violin strings are made from cat