Music-themed gifts for music lovers and musicians – and not just for Christmas! Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring: Variations on a Shaker Hymn (London Symphony Orchestra; Walter Susskind, cond.) Mozart Kugeln Mozart ‘balls’ are delicious morsels of pistachio marzipan and praline,

Everyone will have an opinion on this – do you want the traditional German heavy recordings? The new interpretive English opinions? Do you want national orchestras? Idiosyncratic readings that make you hear old warhorses with a new manner of understanding?

Composers are well-known for spending most of their time in solitude, in the quietness of a room, in front of a desk or an instrument. They are often the loners of music. But is composing always a one-person job? Are

Unlike others, I often find it difficult to recall my first encounter with a certain composer. So, for Beethoven, it could have been his Für Elise, Symphony No.5 (ta-ta-ta duh) or something else – I don’t know. But anyways, as

Chopin was inspired by the antics of a small dog chasing its tail to write his Waltz No. 6 in D-Flat Major, Op. 64, No. 1. His publisher, Breitkopf & Härtel, added a title on it to let people know

The saying goes this way, quality over quantity. But what if the saying was: quantity creates quality? What if instead of focusing on one or the other, one would lead to the other? In order to grow, a composer —

Composers, especially from the Romantic period onward, have sought to evoke places, real or imagined, in their music – from the awe-inspiring grandeur of the Alps in Liszt‘s Vallée d’Obermann to Debussy‘s shimmering pagodas, the heady sounds, scents and scenes

Five notes, endless possibilities… The pentatonic scale is often associated with popular music — and for a very good reason, it has been used extensively from blues to jazz, rock, pop and everything in between. However, as much as it