The great pianist Artur Schnabel famously spoke of his interest in music which was “better than it can be performed”, in particular the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. In this quote, he expresses why the sonatas of Beethoven, for
Articles
On New Year’s Day 1957, Arturo Toscanini suffered a stroke. Unable to recover, he passed away on 16 January at the age of 89 at his home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx in New York City. His body
The job of a conductor has evolved greatly over the years. From a simple timekeeper, to rehearsal director, to full-blown interpreter, the conductor’s role has no doubt grown in prominence. But how do they do what they do? What’s all
Glenn Gould is my favourite pianist. There, I said it. The reason I like him is because he is unconventional; unconventional in his approach to the stuffy world of classical music, unconventional in his interpretations, and unconventional in his mannerisms.
On 25 May 1888, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the Director of the Imperial Theatres in St. Petersburg, approached Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). “I am planning to write a libretto on “La Belle au Bois Dormant” after Perrault’s fairy tale,” he writes. “I
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) saw Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca in Florence in 1895 with Sarah Bernhardt in the leading role. He immediately envisioned an opera without excessive proportions or a decorative spectacle, nor one that called for a superabundance of
Robert Schumann (1810-1856) always envisioned a national German opera that presented a complete union of text and music with a plot based upon a supernatural and mythical German legend. As he confessed to a friend in 1842, “Do you know
Universal Beauty I chatted to composer Paul K. Joyce back in 2017, when he was in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to create a set of songs set to words by then-7-year-old Johnnie Douglas-Pennant, who died in a tragic