Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881–1945) wrote two ballets, one that has achieved some fame (The Miraculous Mandarin of 1926), but the other has faded from today’s stages. In its time, however, the first ballet, The Wooden Prince, was staged everywhere.

There is a strange phenomenon happening in our modern world. The prominence of slow music in the classical genre. The slowing down of pace, the reduction of notes — and instruments — and the shortening of the music (or the

Jean-Baptiste Lully was an Italian-born French court and operatic composer who is credited with the invention of the “French Overture” in the 1650s. In addition, his music produced a radical revolution in the style of dances at the court, replacing

Violinist Viktoria Mullova won first prize at the prestigious Sibelius Competition in Helsinki in 1980 and two years later captured the Gold Medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1982. Winning at the Tchaikovsky brought her international fame, but

Leonard Bernstein – composer, conductor, pianist, educator, and more – is remembered as one of the greatest American musicians of all time. His voracious appetite for art extended to his love life. He had many relationships with men, but he

Franz Joseph Haydn is considered the father of the symphony, and John Field (1782-1837), the father of the Nocturne. Although Field was born somewhere between Beethoven and Schubert, his music seems much closer to Chopin, who appeared thirty years later.

The music of Alfred Schnittke is marked by an intense expressiveness, an unpredictable flow of ideas, an innate sense of drama, and a natural lyricism. While traditional genres retained their relevance, Schnittke gave new life to old forms by squeezing

In our last blog, we looked at the stories of some unfinished masterpieces being restored. Let us continue our exploration, starting with Mahler’s Symphony No. 10. Mahler: Symphony 10 In 1910, Gustav Mahler was not a happy man. He had