The piano sonata is often a vehicle to express struggle or psychological depth, from heroic battles with fate to intimate expressions of despair. But throughout the history of classical music, many composers have used the sonata to convey something very

Violin concertos have been popular for centuries, but thanks to YouTube, they’ve found a new global audience of millions. From Beethoven to Vivaldi to Paganini, these videos showcase not only the sheer beauty of the violin concerto repertoire but also

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Competition has long been a defining feature of the performing arts. For decades, it has shaped careers, professional standards, and artistic ambition. As we all know, the instrumental music world, particularly for piano, violin, and conducting, has developed an extraordinary

Valentine’s Day and the attendant glorification of coupledom can be a rough time for single people. Fortunately for those people, composers have written a number of compelling works about solitude, independence, withdrawal, and self-possession. For listeners spending Valentine’s Day single

Slow, gentle, and mysteriously timeless, the music of Pēteris Vasks seems to exist outside the ordinary flow of time. It is like an echo from distant landscapes and deep inner silence. A central figure in contemporary music, Vasks fuses the

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I’ve been working with London-based Chinese pianist Siqian Li, whose debut disc is a selection of transcriptions for solo piano of works by, amongst others, Maurice Ravel, George Gershwin and Alexis Weissenberg. The Weissenberg transcriptions, in particular, have really caught