The viola may be the less flashy sibling of the violin, but in the hands of these seven great women composers, the viola truly shines as a solo instrument. From the bold modernism of Marga Richter and Peggy Glanville-Hicks to
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Based on Bach
Gounod: Ave Maria March 8th, 2021Charles Gounod took the first prelude of Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier and started noodling around on it, and his piano teacher, Pierre Zimmerman, with whom he was studying at the Paris Conservatoire, took note of it. J.S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, -
Avoiding Our Peers March 8th, 2021 A natural process for the creative artist is to reproduce what he admires. In the case of composers, it translates as composing the music that they heard and enjoyed, or the music that they want to hear. Of course, the -
Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
“In Search of Lost Time” and the Mysterious Violin Sonata March 7th, 2021Born 150 years ago in Paris, Marcel Proust was a sickly child and he suffered from poor health for most of his short life. Yet his almost inexhaustible complexity as a novelist, critic and essayist has reverberated through virtually every -
The Wisdom of Alfred Brendel March 7th, 2021 It’s hard to believe Alfred Brendel turned 90 at the start of 2021. He’s been a part of my musical landscape since I was a teenager, when my mother, who was a great fan of Brendel and admired him in -
Practicing! Oh the Troubles with Motivation and Concentration March 6th, 2021 Practicing has never been more challenging than right now while for the foreseeable future scheduling live concerts is in doubt. Amateurs, students, professionals—we’re all in the same boat. Without a performance on the horizon I too am unmotivated to practice. -
How I Fell in Love With Classical Music March 5th, 2021 How did you fall in love with classical music? We did a survey of our writers to find out what they considered their top musical pieces, composers, or performers, starting with the work or performance that made them seriously fall -
Not My First Quarantine: An Interview With Martin Ng March 4th, 2021 The prospect of putting on an opera these days has been more than many opera companies can face. The National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, known as Weiwuying, in Taiwan, however, has been able to forge ahead with getting operas -
5 Great Piano Sonatas March 4th, 2021 The piano sonata genre boasts some of the finest music written for the instrument, from the wit and inventiveness of Haydn or the rhetoric and forward vision of Beethoven to the passionate romanticism of Chopin and Liszt, and the modernism