The voice is the ultimate instrument. It is the first — and, in many ways, the last. Humanity has sung for as long as it has existed. While there are countless emblematic works for solo voice, it is perhaps in

As the year 1926 dawned, classical music was on the brink of technological revolution. New tools for capturing, transmitting, and synchronising sound were changing everything about how people listened to and interacted with live music. Radios were entering living rooms

The intertwined lives of Frédéric Chopin, George Sand, and her daughter Solange Dudevant form one of the most complex family stories of the Romantic era. Today, we’re looking at the relationship between the three. We’ll trace the origins and evolution

Every pianist lives in dialogue with the past…some more than others. For Yunchan Lim, the youngest-ever winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, that dialogue stretches back for generations. Across multiple interviews, Lim has often spoken about the pianists

The principal cellist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Blaise Déjardin (b. 1984), has an idea! He wrote a work for cello ensemble that calls on all the things both a cellist and the BSO might do. The work was commissioned

The disastrous premiere of Rachmaninoff’s first symphony is one of the most infamous events in classical music history. Today, we celebrate the sweeping Russian romanticism of Sergei Rachmaninoff, but in 1897, his long-awaited First Symphony debuted to confusion, hostility, and

I recently discovered Stockhausen’s text-notated collections Aus den sieben Tagen — a wonderfully inventive approach to rethinking improvised music. To Stockhausen, what we commonly call improvisation is never entirely free; it remains tied to traditions and inherited reflexes, whether from

First created in 1853 as work for piano and cello, Gounod combined an improvisation with Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C major, BWV 846, from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier. By superimposing his melody over the 1722 work, Gounod