Here are ten outstanding Christmas-themed classical pieces, including both the well-known and the little-known. 1. G.F. Handel: Messiah Though especially popular at Christmas time, it is only “Part the First” of Handel's Messiah that pertains to the season—the latter two sections address Christ’s passion and resurrection. There are some 100 versions of this magisterial work currently [...]
Great music pierces the soul… and can sometimes terrify it. Over the centuries, composers, like nearly all artists of every variety, have been fascinated by the subject of death and by the supernatural—the world of witches, goblins, ghosts, and demons. Composers have given us Dances of the Dead, frightful tone poems and songs, scary opera [...]
Here are ten glorious pieces of music for Holy Week that will remind you that there is beauty in this world. As a lifelong Catholic, I’ve always taken Holy Week seriously in a personal way, and the reading of “The Passion of the Lord” on Palm Sunday always deeply affects me. You’d think I’d never heard the [...]
Johann Sebastian Bach shows how mind and soul, spirit and body connect. In its complex richness and wholeness his music suggests the unity of faith and reason, science, and imagination. Full of relationships that stimulate the ear and the mind, it expresses the multifold splendor of creation itself. “To strip human nature until its divine [...]
While everyday life feels rootless, cultural and artistic accomplishment stands as a steady anchor and source of pride and joy and discovery. Music, the most popular and beloved of the arts, connects us to something higher than us, perhaps a way of life and set of feelings that flourished before we were born. Music can [...]
In the “St. Matthew Passion,” Bach indulges his gypsy soul. It is as though Bach, in his broad and deep humanity, his capacity for feeling all kinds and degrees of sorrow and joy, was reaching out to all his fellow human beings, believers and non-believers alike, and impressing upon them what was for him the [...]
Playing violin unaccompanied is the most exposed sort of music-making, with a vulnerability that is both technical and emotional. Its music seems to bring out a personal quality in composers that one doesn’t always get from music for large forces. The purity of the medium and its limitations call forth a challenge to the composer [...]
It’s Halloween, and you’re looking for that perfect, spooky Halloween music that’s a little more sophisticated than “The Monster Mash” and “Thriller” and “Werewolves of London.” Look no further, friends. I’ve done my own hopping around to see what others consider to be their Top 10 classical spooky favorites. My list is a little different; [...]
Johann Sebastian Bach composed his short, comic "Coffee Cantata" in 1735. Likely first premiered in a Leipzig coffee house, it depicts a scene in which a father berates his daughter for drinking the intoxicating beverage. Here is the text in English translation, with a video with English subtitles below: Recitative Narrator Be quiet, stop chattering, [...]
Having played the cello for more than thirty years, I am often asked what I would recommend for listeners, especially for those who aren’t necessarily concertgoers. As a cellist, it’s hard to categorize what to listen to. Some pieces are fun to play and to listen to, while others require such technical practice that they [...]
What a treat is it for a group of amateur string players, busy in their everyday lives, to spend a week in a far-off place and inundate themselves in practice and education concerning a single piece of music and its composer—the sort of exercise usually reserved for professionals. […]
J.S. Bach’s “Mass in B Minor” is the summation of his life’s work and one of the supreme masterpieces of Western classical music. Yet mystery surrounds the work. What was its purpose, how did it come to be written, and how was it intended to be performed? No work of Johann Sebastian Bach is more [...]
Johann Sebastian Bach completed what came to be known as the Mass in B minor in 1749, near the end of the his life, though he had worked on various sections of it for twenty-five years. Why the Lutheran Bach wrote what his son Carl Philipp Emanuel later catalogued as "the Great Catholic Mass" (it uses the Latin [...]
J.S. Bach was among the few who recognized the genius of Jan Dismas Zelenka, a Czech composer who passed into total oblivion after his death. But in listening to Zelenka’s wondrous music, one can only deem the reason for his neglect a mystery. Suppose you were Bach, and no one noticed? Welcome to the early [...]