Traditionally sung at Christmas or the surrounding Christmas holiday season, Christmas carols are some of the most popular and festive holiday songs. They are still sung today in homes, churches, and at public events, and carolling is still a popular

Along with the production of orchestral and opera music in the 19th century, there was a parallel industry that made the same music for smaller forces: piano, piano two-hands, string quartet, small wind ensembles, etc. In the centuries before, music

César Franck was born in the city of Liège on 10 December 1822, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. His father, Nicholas-Joseph was a minor clerk, unemployed at the time, but he had great plans for his

Chamber music featuring the piano has always been popular. The reason is comparatively simple; similarly to a string quartet as a whole ensemble, the piano is a perfect unit in itself. It is also one of the reasons the musical

The series of piano concertos Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed during his years in Vienna is undoubtedly his greatest achievement in instrumental music. The dozen piano concertos composed between February 1784 and December 1786 are works of the highest quality and

Marcel Proust wrote to Gabriel Fauré in 1897, “Monsieur, I not only love, admire and venerate your music, I have been, still am, in love with it.” In our first episode on the magnificent nocturnes of Gabriel Fauré we found

It might come as a surprise, but Franz Schubert wrote almost as much piano music for four hands as for two. His thirty-four compositions in this medium range from his earliest surviving music, the Fantasie D. 48, to his Rondo

In previous blogs we listened to a number of beautiful piano quintets scored for piano and a string quartet. Robert Schumann came up with this arrangement in 1842, and it became the standardised scoring for much of the 19th century