On 30 April 1855, an ensemble of 950 performers piled into the Church of Saint-Eustache, in Paris. They were getting ready to finally premier a Berlioz work that had been specifically composed for the coronation of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in

Trying to catch a train at Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station during rush hours is not a pleasant task. As a main connecting hub for rail traffic throughout greater Tokyo, it handles an average of 3.64 million people per day! And that

What is the Russian sound, or French style in piano playing? What differentiates a pianist who was taught in the English piano tradition from one who studied in Germany? The history of piano playing is built from a large network

The acclaimed Beaux Arts Trio toured worldwide for nearly five decades, but you may not know their founding member, the magnificent cellist Bernard Greenhouse. I first heard him play in a performance with the Bach Aria Group. His luscious sound

He was born Giorgi Melitonovitch Balandchivadze in Saint Petersburg in 1904, and he danced his way into the State Theater of Opera and Ballet, better known as the Mariinsky Ballet. After fleeing to Paris and westernizing his name to George

The clarinet as an instrument was born in the ancient past but came into its own at the time of Mozart. With the assistance of two virtuoso brothers, Anton and Johann Stadler, the clarinet took its place first in chamber

Debussy at the piano! One had to have seen it to appreciate its magic. No words could describe the mysterious enchantment of his playing…– Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1932 2018 marks the centenary of the death of French composer Achille-Claude Debussy (he

When Arturo Toscanini raised his arms at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan on 25 April 1926, he was getting ready for the premier of an unfinished opera. Turandot, the operatic adaptation of an originally 12th-century Persian epic filtered through