Manuel María Ponce (1882-1948), the leading Mexican musician of his time, was a wonderful pianist who composed a substantial number of piano works. These works combine a profound knowledge of the instrument with his Romantic heritage and nationalist tendencies. Manuel

Arguably, the first composer to write true piano music was Ludwig van Beethoven. To be sure, he had tremendous technical ability, and critics wrote, “He was attacking pianos with such force that during the performance, keys, hammers and strings would

Along with the production of orchestral and opera music in the 19th century, there was a parallel industry that made the same music for smaller forces: piano, piano two-hands, string quartet, small wind ensembles, etc. In the centuries before, music

César Franck was born in the city of Liège on 10 December 1822, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. His father, Nicholas-Joseph was a minor clerk, unemployed at the time, but he had great plans for his

Chamber music featuring the piano has always been popular. The reason is comparatively simple; similarly to a string quartet as a whole ensemble, the piano is a perfect unit in itself. It is also one of the reasons the musical

The series of piano concertos Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed during his years in Vienna is undoubtedly his greatest achievement in instrumental music. The dozen piano concertos composed between February 1784 and December 1786 are works of the highest quality and

Marcel Proust wrote to Gabriel Fauré in 1897, “Monsieur, I not only love, admire and venerate your music, I have been, still am, in love with it.” In our first episode on the magnificent nocturnes of Gabriel Fauré we found

It might come as a surprise, but Franz Schubert wrote almost as much piano music for four hands as for two. His thirty-four compositions in this medium range from his earliest surviving music, the Fantasie D. 48, to his Rondo