For its 25th year, the Oxford Piano Festival has put together a splendid array of world-class pianists, vibrant, varied programmes, and inspirational teaching. Founded by the renowned pianist and conductor Marios Papadopoulos in 1998, and hosted by the Oxford Philharmonic

Francisca Edwiges Neves Gonzaga (1847-1935), known as Chiquinha Gonzaga, is considered one of the most important female figures in Brazilian music history. She was a feminist and abolitionist, and she was the first of many things: the first Choro composer,

Russian pianist Alexei Volodin, born on 17 July 1977 in St Petersburg, is highly lauded for his sensitive touch and the technical brilliance of his playing. A highly virtuoso and deeply philosophical musician, Volodin has no time for superficial effects.

The Gallica digital library at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris is one of the great research treasuries of the world. It was established in 1997 and now holds more than 10 million documents accessible online: books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, cartoons,

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