“Minors of the Majors” invites you to discover compositions by the great classical composers that for one reason or another have not reached the musical mainstream. Please enjoy, and keep listening!

He has been called “one of the most talented theatre men of his era,” and we primarily know him for writing the libretto of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. However, Emanuel Schikaneder was also an impresario, dramatist, actor,

Haydn’s Mass No. 10 has a nickname that’s understandable, the Paukenmesse (Timpani Mass) due to its use of the timpani. It also has a name written by Haydn into the manuscript, ‘Missa in tempore belli,’ i.e., Mass in Time of

In 1897, Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) wrote his last symphonic poem and, in contrast to the preceding four he’d just finished, The Water Goblin, The Noon Witch, The Golden Spinning Wheel, and The Wood Dove, this last work had no story

In August 1959, Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh was undergoing a complete refurbishment, and to celebrate its reopening a year later, a new opera was definitely required. Since Benjamin Britten already was the artistic director of the Festival at that time,

“Minors of the Majors” invites you to discover compositions by the great classical composers that for one reason or another have not reached the musical mainstream. Please enjoy, and keep listening!

Nothing stokes the fire of adolescence and the enormous physical and psychological changes that occur during the teenage years quite like the teenage girl and/or boy next door. Franz Schubert spent his formative years in Lichtental, the ninth district in

In the summer of 1936, the French composer Oliver Messiaen (1908-1992) was on holiday on the shores of Lac de Laffrey. He had a summer home here and it would be the place where he wrote the majority of his