Dedicated to Clara Schumann, Brahms’ Klavierstücke Op.118 were written in 1893 again at Bad Ischl during his summer sojourn and are probably his most well-known opus nowadays. Julius August Philipp Spitta, a German musicologist, wrote to Brahms after receiving the

Commissioned by the Associated Music Publishers in New York, Alexander Tcherepnin premiered his second symphony in Chicago on 20 March 1952. It took Tcherepnin a long while to finish the composition, as he labored on the orchestration for the better

We are so used to attending concerts in specially-designed large halls that it is easy to forget that until about 1850, most music was experienced in people’s homes, churches, small intimate venues or ‘salons’. The Salon Concert was particularly popular

Haunted by the memory of Julietta, a girl he once spied singing from her window in a seaside holiday town, the Parisian bookseller Michel searches for her in his dreams. He meets a number of characters in increasingly bizarre encounters

Situated on a hill across the Gold Horn from the old city of Istanbul, the Levantine neighborhood of Pera—today known as Beyoğlu/Taksim —transformed into a remarkable cultural district in the second half of the 19th century. Called the crossroads of

Maurice Ravel hailed from the French Pyrenees, and he was born merely a couple of miles from the Spanish border. Growing up in Madrid, he had a natural fascination with Spain and one of his earliest pieces, written after he

Minimalism, a musical style which developed in the US in 1960s, was a revolt against the all-pervasive atonality and fashionable “crazy creepy music” (Philip Glass) of the avant-garde, which, in its myriad forms and sub-genres, had dominated classical music since

A tragic story of jealousy, vengeance and sacrifice, Rigoletto is one of Verdi’s most popular operas. In fact, when it premiered in Venice at La Fenice on 11 March 1851 to a full house, the aria “La donna è mobile”