One of my favorite pieces to perform is Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances. It is full of infectious rhythms, melancholy melodies, and subtle effects. János Starker performs it in the cello rendition.

Antonin Dvořák composed his Sixth Symphony explicitly for the Vienna Philharmonic and its chief conductor Hans Richter in a matter of months. After a number of postponements, the work finally premiered with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra on March 25, 1881,

The piano has undergone all sorts of innovations and embellishments since its invention by Bartolomeo Cristofori in the early 1700s. The most significant advances in the piano’s design were in response to demands from pianists and composers for a sturdier

The premiere performance of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony on 23 March 1886 immediately brought forth strong opinions on both sides of the critical divide. Somewhat surprisingly, the fierce and feared critic César Cui liked the work, and favorably commented on the

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