With its driving rhythms, distinct flavors, accessibility, and charm, Aram Khachaturian's piano concerto was an instant success in 1936. Have no doubt, it’s a sizzler. It’s decisive, flamboyant, and arrives and departs in a pyrotechnic dazzle... Aram Khachaturian Nothing in the classical music repertoire says “summertime” more to me than Aram Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto. I [...]
Franz Schmidt’s lament makes grief beautiful. It elevates it to something irreproachable, like snow on a mountain peak that, when you’re stumbling around in it, stings and chills and makes you lose your footing, but from the distance, oh, the inexpressible beauty. As the story has it, when Hungarian-born twentieth century composer Franz Schmidt received the [...]
There’s something about Frédéric François Chopin that puts him and his music in a category of its own. Born in Poland, a child prodigy on the piano, Chopin trained in Warsaw, and left Poland at age twenty. By twenty-one, he was settled in Paris and quickly became Someone Worth Listening To… I’ve always liked Chopin [...]
The problem with poor Max Bruch was that he was born too late. What he produced is art that seems to give off an invisible radiance, one you can feel on your flushed cheeks, deep within your heart as you listen. This is art that got overlooked because it came just a little too late [...]
Easter likely hadn’t been on Edward Elgar’s mind when he wrote his “Enigma Variations,” yet this wondrous, utterly memorable piece conjures up a rush of powerful spirituality, a sense of Easter Sunday grandeur. It is most decidedly “death has been conquered; arise and go forth” music. While my first choice for classical music on Easter [...]
Claude Debussy’s “Afternoon of a Faun” delivers volumes of sensation. Languor, sensuality, euphoria, curiosity, an awareness of the exotic. You are flung back to your own childhood, your adolescence, all awash in new experiences, colors, sensations. For ten fleeting minutes, you let the music cradle you, transport you… When I listen to Debussy’s “Prelude to [...]
Camille Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 has so many distinct and wonderful flavors, it just amazes me. And the first movement is so vibrant, unexpected, cinematic. The second movement utterly transports me. Being haunted by music sounds like something I should be writing about in late October, but I think it will still work. And there’s no [...]
Are you dipping your toe into the classical music waters, not sure if you’re up for the full swim, but willing to wade around a bit? Hop in—the temperature is just right! Here are 10 tips for you. I love when people contact me to express their interest in classical music. And 2018 is already turning [...]
You are not too old to start. It is not too hard. If you harbor any interest in learning how to play the violin, or if you’re merely curious to see a violin up close, examine how it works, what’s stopping you? Here are five easy steps to take. I know, it sounds like a [...]
In the second act of Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera, “Hänsel and Gretel,” there is a treasure that will live forever in the hearts of countless listeners: Fourteen angels take the stage and gather round and protect the children, a prayer come to life. Hansel and Gretel waited deep in the forest for their father. When noon came, each ate [...]
There I was, two hours into the eleven-hour flight. Then I heard the piece, the same one I’d been listening to for months, and suddenly I knew right then that my life had been irrevocably altered. I fell in love somewhere near the North Pole one afternoon while kicking back at 35,000 feet. It was sudden, [...]
The Vatican knew it had a winner on its hands with Allegri’s “Miserere” and, wanting to preserve its aura of mystery and exclusivity, forbade replication, threatening anyone who attempted to copy or publish it with excommunication. But that didn’t stop the teenaged Mozart. The fourteen-year-old Mozart didn’t see himself as being a music pirate, mind [...]