“Minors of the Majors” invites you to discover compositions by the great classical composers that for one reason or another have not reached the musical mainstream. Please enjoy, and keep listening!

Many artists in the 19th and 20th centuries were inspired by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose works had been re-discovered with Felix Mendelsohn’s performance of Bach’s ‘St. Matthew’s Passion’ in Berlin in 1829. For composers such as Richard

Goldberg Variations: Variation 10, Fugetta From J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations/Britten Sinfonia dir. Thomas Gould (2015) Released by Harmonia Mundi J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations: Variation 10, FugettaBritten Sinfonia’s Associate Leader, Thomas Gould directs the ensemble in Dmitry Sitkovetsky’s beautifully realised and

Irony and Parody became key moments in German modernism. But parody and irony are not identical. While irony might be described as a strategy, most successful parodies derive their effect from the comic incongruity between the original and its parody.

In the last decade of the 19th century, European culture was perceived as increasingly decadent and degenerate. Visual art had abandoned representation and liberated color and line; literature weakened the narrative structures and loosened meanings, and music used a technically

Johann Sebastian Bach was a ferocious musical cannibal! He habitually borrowed from himself and others in order to adapt a composition to a particular performing venue or occasion. In 1729 he was appointed director of the Collegium Musicum in Leipzig.

The art of the transcription has been with us for centuries, coming into play whenever someone tried to play a work written for one instrument on another. We were listening, the other day, to a recording of J.S. Bach transcribed

When people see the name Anton Webern on a concert bill, they habitually run for cover! But Webern would not be Webern if he hadn’t studied the old masters during his student years at Vienna University. In fact, he studied