Why do some of the world’s greatest composers stop writing music long before their deaths? In the popular imagination, composers write until their dying breath. Everyone who has seen the movie Amadeus remembers the scene where Mozart is on his

It seems to me that stand sharing is dead! Perhaps it started with the covid epidemic, but the advent and proliferation of iPad tablets is certainly contributing to going solo on a stand. My chamber music colleagues are using them

No country does winter like Russia, and no composer evokes Russia like Tchaikovsky. Today we’re looking at Tchaikovsky’s most wintry works. What makes a piece of classical music “wintry”, you might ask? Here’s a starting point: References in the title

Everyone approaches the winter holidays differently: some people feel excitement, while others feel dread. It can be a season of celebration, crushing loneliness, and everything in between. The great composers also experienced a wide variety of Christmas celebrations. Today, we’re

Christmas is always an emotionally charged time of year. It can be everything from a season of hearty celebration to crushing loneliness. Today, we’re looking at five emotional, memorable Christmases from the lives of the great composers: Wagner, Chopin, Tchaikovsky,

For choral musicians, Christmas is an especially joyous time, as it is filled with the warmth of singing beloved carols and sacred works that celebrate the spirit of the season. That shared experience of harmonising in festive concerts creates a

In our last article about Maurice Ravel (Read “Maurice Ravel at the Turn of the Century”), we left off shortly after the resolution of the affaire Ravel, the controversy surrounding Ravel’s exclusion by the judges of the Prix de Rome

For many of us, we think of Spring as the start of the seasons – Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter – saving the cold for the end. For Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks (b. 1946), who started thinking about the shape of