Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2 Once upon a time, a ballet dancer had a dream of doing a ballet on a classical Greek theme. At the time, he was just a dancer in the Imperial Russian Ballet and

Having been born, raised and educated in rural Austria ill prepared Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) for the acidic and highly competitive musical environment of imperial Vienna. Retaining his shy and unassuming demeanor throughout his life, Bruckner presented a wide target for

Now, the most famous fight about music in 1913, occurred at the première of The Rite of Spring. Audience in an uproar, fights in the audience, the dancers can’t hear the music for the noise in the hall, Nijinsky futilely

Orchestral musicians like to have fun just like everyone else. We may appear dignified but fooling around is a requirement; pranks are ingenious. Sometimes the joke is on the conductor. There was once a conductor who was not, shall we

Recently, I came across a composition entitled Three Boneless Preludes for a Dog. With a name like that, it was instantly clear that it could only have come from the pen of Erik Satie. But it was still rather surprising

We went to a concert the other day of songs from WWI – popular tunes for a war that started a hundred years ago. What surprised us was how familiar some of the tunes were. Songs such as George M.

Grechaninov’s most enduring and influential musical gift to posterity is surely found in his liturgical music. Breaking entirely new ground, he returned to the old Slavonic traditional chants of the Russian Greek Orthodox Church. Folk-like harmonies and motivic counterpoint provide

Throughout his long and industrious musical career, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) never strayed far away from home. Content to live and work in his native community, and possibly remembering that he was once thrown in jail for overstaying his leave