The solo violin has long been acknowledged as the perfect instrument to express emotions like love, longing, heartbreak, rapture, and romance. The Romantic era lasted from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century and produced numerous works that
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Is Playing in an Ensemble Your Dream? 12 Pointers for the Novice August 31st, 2019 Some of the greatest gems of music are written for small ensemble. But in chamber music you don’t have a conductor to tell you what to do, nor are you entirely on your own to make musical decisions. How does -
Could Music Disappear One Day? August 30th, 2019 This is the Italian composer Giovanni Sollima playing one of his creations. What is it about music that moves us so? Where else can you see a person react to anything like this, except through music? Look at how this -
Schumann’s Final Piece: The ‘Ghost’ Variations August 29th, 2019 There’s a special poignancy to Schumann’s Geistervariationen (“Ghost Variations”). Dedicated to his beloved wife Clara, they were written just a few weeks before he was committed to a lunatic asylum at Endenich, and were the last piece of music he -
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Herman Melville and Moby Dick August 28th, 2019Hollywood has always been eager to bring epic novels to the silver screen. And such was the case when they took on Moby Dick in 1956. Ray Bradbury, who confessed to director John Huston that he had “never been able -
My Two Encounters with Pianist Jörg Demus August 27th, 2019 It was on a day in April—it was actually the 17th of April—when someone told me that Jörg Demus had passed away. In the Internet era, news spreads like wildfire. But the source of all this commotion came from Wikipedia, -
“Flower of Jasmine, so fair!” August 26th, 2019 Anton Arensky (1861-1906) could not be considered a musical rebel by any stretch of the imagination. Perceived to lack a distinctive personal style, Rimsky-Korsakov famously said, “in his youth Arensky did not escape some influence from me; later the influence -
Musicians and Artists: Marie Fel and Maurice Quentin La Tour August 25th, 2019 The French pastillist Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704-1788) is known for his portraits of the most famous men and women of his time, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. He also captured some of the most -
Pianists Behaving Badly August 25th, 2019 ‘From the outset all manner of unacceptable behaviour, whether manifesting itself emotionally in false rapture or facial grimace, the stamping of feet to mark the rhythm, accompanied by an all-embracing unsightly body movement, the shaking and nodding of the head