Written in a rush for a celebratory concert, Shostakovich’s Festive Overture is a joyous bubble starting with a brilliant fanfare. Written for a concert in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theatre celebrating the 37th anniversary of the October 1917 Revolution, this

In the last days of WWII, German composer Richard Strauss saw the world he knew in tatters around him. Germany was occupied by foreign powers, the great monuments of German culture had been destroyed – its opera houses and theatres,

Italian cellist Mauro Giuliani (1781-1829) made his home in Vienna in 1806. In 1813 he played in the famous performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony during a gala event, which saw the participation of many of Vienna’s most celebrated musicians, including

The German symbolist poet Stefan George (1868-1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) probably never met – as one commentator said, ‘One reason could be that as charismatic leaders of cults, they too much resembled each other.’ In Paris in 1889, Stefan

“The Last Rose of Summer” reached a world audience as part of the romantic opera Martha by Friedrich von Flotow (1812-1883), premiered in Vienna on 25 November 1847. Adapted from a ballet to a story by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges,

In his 1928 work Gli uccelli (The Birds), Ottorino Respighi brings us classical European birds, using music from earlier times as his inspiration. The core of the work is a selection from 5 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers’ compositions for harpsichord

As summer is stormily giving way to autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, and the next corona lockdown is just around the corner, we still fondly remember those warm and carefree summer days. The passing of the seasons and a deep

J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations (Glenn Gould) We were thinking about Bach’s Goldberg Variations the other evening. Written, as related by Bach’s biographer Johann Forkel, for the ill and often sleepless Count Kaiserling, who wished for some night music that was