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Approachable stories about composers, performers and the music itself
In Paris in 1939, Joaquín Rodrigo and Victoria Kamhi sold their piano to pay hospital bills. That year Rodrigo completed Concierto de Aranjuez. Before a score for guitar and orchestra could reach its performers, the couple worked with braille, transcribed notes and corrected the music together.
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Words were later added to the English horn melody in Dvořák's New World Symphony: Goin' Home, created by William Arms Fisher in 1922. Earlier, when Dvořák was writing the symphony, the young musician Harry Burleigh sang him African American spirituals learned from his grandfather.
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In Corelli's La Folia, violin and accompanying instruments vary a dance originating in Portugal.
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Mahina's lunch and dinner playlists include the four mazurkas of Chopin's Op. 33 played by Seong-Jin Cho.
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Variation 18 of Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is made by inverting a melody from the original violin work.
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In 1965, twenty-year-old Jacqueline du Pré recorded Elgar's Cello Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by John Barbirolli. Barbirolli had played in the same orchestra as a cellist at the concerto's premiere in 1919. Having first taken part as an orchestral musician, he returned to the work forty-six years later as its conductor. The recording brought that experience together with the young soloist's playing.
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Debussy completed the piano collection Estampes in the summer of 1903. Its three pieces, Pagodes, La soirée dans Grenade and Jardins sous la pluie, bring together Javanese gamelan, a Spanish dance rhythm and French children's songs. He wrote the collection in the French village of Bichain. In a letter to the conductor André Messager, he explained that when he could not afford to travel, he used his imagination instead.
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In 1903, Debussy heard Rameau's opera Castor et Pollux and wrote a favourable review in the newspaper Gil Blas.
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Mozart wrote his Clarinet Concerto, K.622, for Anton Stadler's instrument with its extended lower register.
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On 11 October 1830, Chopin performed his E minor Piano Concerto at the National Theatre in Warsaw.
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In Verlaine's poem Clair de lune, masked figures play the lute and dance.
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In December 1888, Satie advertised his scores in La Lanterne japonaise, the magazine of the cabaret Le Divan japonais.
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Grieg's Morning Mood comes from his incidental music for Ibsen's play Peer Gynt.
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The name Air on the G String does not come from the title Bach gave a movement of his Orchestral Suite No. 3.
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Of the pieces in The Carnival of the Animals, Saint-Saëns published only The Swan during his lifetime.
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The Princesse de Polignac originally intended to commission music for three pianos from Poulenc.
Continue readingIn the winter of 1838, Chopin and George Sand stayed in a former monastery in Mallorca.
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Jean-Pierre Rampal attended medical school until his third year.
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