In her 64 years as the reigning monarch of the British Empire, Queen Victoria oversaw a prolific era of cultural, industrial, and political change. Even more remarkable was the fact that music occupied a central place in the lives of

Leopold van der Pals (1884–1966) took a different approach to the music of the planets in his 1931/1956 work Sphere-Music to the Dramatic Poem Mönch Wanderer, Op. 84. His Monk Wanderer was originally intended as a stage piece for actors,

The Austrian dramatist Franz Xaver Told (1793–1849) had a home on the stage of the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, producing a large number of plays for the theatre. He was talented, but worked so quickly that most of

Did you know that “World Piano Day” is always celebrated on the 88th day of the year? The reasoning is relatively simple, 88 keys on the piano, celebration on the 88th day of the year, get it? Basically, that means

Starting in 2015, British composer Michael Zev Gordon started to create a musical diary of 6 or 7 pieces per year that capture a ‘one idea or emotional state or a kind of sound’. Sometimes the fragments in the pieces

The spa town Baden-Baden is located in the German state of Baden Württemberg, at the border of the Black Forest and within ten kilometers of the Rhine River. The Romans knew the curing springs at Baden-Baden, and in the 19th

The English conductor Martyn Brabbins decided that, after 120 years, Elgar’s Enigma Variations needed an update. As his own 60th birthday was coming in 2019, Brabbins commissioned, with the help of the BBC, ‘a new set of Enigma Variations’. Elgar

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) had a wonderous gift for combining melody with an adventurous harmonic sense. Paired with an intuitive understanding of formal design and a brilliant piano technique, Chopin composed some of the most beloved compositions in Classical music. And