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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Les Femmes “Compositeurs”
Piano Music by French Romantic Women Composers June 4th, 2023In the exciting cultural institution we know as the “Parisian salon,” Salonnières organized gatherings in their homes that brought together writers, artists, philosophers, musicians, and other patrons. “It stimulated socializing between the sexes and brought nobles and bourgeois together, eventually -
On This Day
4 June: Yevgeny Mravinsky Was Born June 4th, 2023The city of St. Petersburg was founded in 1703, and it quickly developed into “the most opulent, precocious, and enlightened metropolis in the Russian empire.” The Academy of Sciences was founded in 1717, and Mikhail Glinka produced the first nationalist -
Samuil Feinberg the Composer
“Any work of art leaves us an impression of uniqueness and rarity” June 3rd, 2023For a number of commentators, the pianist Samuil Feinberg (1890-1962) was considered a bridge, the most important link, “between the two distinct factions of the celebrated Russian school of pianism, which pitted Scriabin’s mystical, sexual, opiate music against Prokofiev’s dynamism -
On This Day
3 June: Georges Bizet Died June 3rd, 2023Vicious reviews have been known to severely damage careers and artistic prospects. In the case of George Bizet (1838-1875), it has been suggested that the horrendous initial reception of Carmen had somehow contributed to the composer’s death. The opera premiered -
The Widows of Bach, Mozart, and Mendelssohn: What Happened to Them? June 3rd, 2023 Music lovers have always been fascinated by a good composer’s death story. Beethoven supposedly raised his arm in defiance of a thunderstorm while on his deathbed. An entire mythology arose surrounding Mozart’s final illness (“was he poisoned?”). Bach’s Art of -
New Music for the 20th Century June 2nd, 2023 John Cage was given a book of the I Ching (Book of Changes), a classic Chinese text that uses a hexagram symbol, to create order out of seemingly random occurrences. One of the first works that he used the I -
The Rules of Writing: Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Greeting Cards June 1st, 2023 The Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895–1968) developed a private system of musical cryptography and used it to create a cycle of compositions. His Greeting Cards, op. 170, cycle began in 1963 and ended with the composer’s death. His system of -
Lorena Paz Nieto June 1st, 2023 ‘So Much to Discover’ UK-based Spanish soprano Lorena Paz Nieto is equally at home in the worlds of opera and song. As well as already landing leading roles in operas by Donizetti, Mozart, Handel, and Britten, Lorena is a previous