The love story between Robert and Clara Schumann is often regarded as one of the most romantic in classical music history. Happily for historians, many of their love letters survive. They document their inner thoughts and emotions, as well as
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The Devil in the Guitar
Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Capriccio diabolico January 14th, 2022Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) is best known to us as the consummate virtuoso violinist. He was the most famous violinist of his day and his name still resonates when speaking of intricately difficult music. In addition to the violin, he was -
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14 January: Puccini’s Tosca Was Premiered January 14th, 2022Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) saw Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca in Florence in 1895 with Sarah Bernhardt in the leading role. He immediately envisioned an opera without excessive proportions or a decorative spectacle, nor one that called for a superabundance of -
John Adams January 13th, 2022 “I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky” Celebrating his 75th birthday in 2022, American composer John Adams is considered one of the most frequently performed living composers of concert music. Primarily known for his operatic -
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3 January: Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust Was Premiered January 13th, 2022Robert Schumann (1810-1856) always envisioned a national German opera that presented a complete union of text and music with a plot based upon a supernatural and mythical German legend. As he confessed to a friend in 1842, “Do you know -
Sergey Vasilenko: Chinese Suite January 12th, 2022 The Russian composer Sergey Vasilenko (1872-1956) might not be a household name today, but he was considered a master orchestrator during his days as professor at the Moscow Conservatory. He originally studied music theory with Grechaninov, and while studying law -
Celestial Project – Four Years On January 11th, 2022 Universal Beauty I chatted to composer Paul K. Joyce back in 2017, when he was in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to create a set of songs set to words by then-7-year-old Johnnie Douglas-Pennant, who died in a tragic -
Frédéric Chopin and His Circle of Friends January 10th, 2022 No single instrument served the cult of self-expression more comprehensively than the piano. It could emulate the rising and falling inflections of human speech and the outlines of non-verbal expressions from a sigh to a scream. Frédéric Chopin (1810-49), more -
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10 January: Mischa Maisky Was Born January 10th, 2022Happy Birthday Mischa Maisky, born on 10 January 1948 in Riga, Latvia. Maisky has the distinction of being the only cellist in the world to have studied with both Mstislav Rostropovich and Gregor Piatigorsky. The legendary Rostropovich praised Maisky as