Sergei Prokofiev was still a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory when he took the stage on 7 August 1912 to premier his 1st Piano Concerto. Since it was his first appearance with an orchestra, and expecting a rather large

When Joseph Haydn was putting the finishing touches on a symphony during the later stages of his career, he dejectedly wrote. “The piece on which I am now working would have been already finished if it were not that my

The psychological and emotional reasons why musicians perform and why we feel a need to connect and communicate with audiences is a broad and complex subject. For many musicians, performing is their raison d’être – the need, the will to

What do you get if one of classical music’s most beloved performers teams up with one of today’s most popular composers? It really is a no brainer, as Azul (the title means blue in Spanish) combines the collective imagination of

Rossini’s last opera, the four-act Guillaume Tell, with a composite French libretto based on Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell, was produced at the Paris Opéra on 3 August 1829. However, within three performances the opera’s length of roughly four hours and

Say “Glenn Gould”, and most people will respond with “Bach”, such is the late great Canadian pianist’s special relationship with the music of J S Bach, and specifically the Goldberg Variations, which Gould recorded at the beginning and the end

When playing in an ensemble, are you in a world of your own or do you create strong perceptive links with your fellow players? It is this world of the imperceptible that Professor Peter Keller of the Western Sydney University