For the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, an international arts festival was planned, and, as its centerpiece, a gigantic day-long music-theater work designed and coordinated by the avant-garde American director Robert Wilson.
Wilson titled the projected work “Civil Wars.” The story line was...Episode details...
Composers Datebook, the award-winning program about this day in classical music history, is giving away a copy of the acclaimed 85-disc 'Beethoven: Complete Edition' to celebrate its launch on social media!
Today in 1965, “Lizzie Borden” premiered at the New York City Opera. The new opera depicted a fictionalized version of a real-life event: a gruesome double axe-murder of Andrew and Abby Borden that occurred in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. Andrew Borden’s daughter, Lizzie, was accused of...Episode details...
“Commedia dell'arte” is the name given to a kind of theater popular throughout Italy during the 18th century. In this improvised, rough and tumble genre, a group of stock figures with names like “Harlequin,” “Pierrot,” and “Punchinello” would reappear time and time again in various farcical...Episode details...
When your instrument is nicknamed “the burping bedpost,” it’s hard to get respect in refined circles. So it’s understandable then, that the bassoon section of, say, a major London orchestra might indulge in a bit of day-dreaming in which a gang of hot-rodding motorcycling bassoonists blow into...Episode details...
On this day in the year 1886, critic Gustav Dompke wrote these lines in the “German Times” of Vienna, after attending a performance of one of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies:
“We recoil in horror before this rotting odor which rushes into our nostrils from the disharmonies of this putrefactive...Episode details...
One of the most serious—and daunting—of musical forms is the passacaglia, in which an unchanging melodic pattern repeats itself while other lines of melody offer elaboration and counterpoint to the unwavering tread of the repeated motive. The result tends to be deliberate, somber, and...Episode details...
In 2010, the American Composers Forum launched ChoralQuest, a specially-commissioned series of new works written especially for middle school and junior high choirs. The idea was to expand the available repertoire for young choirs, introduce choirs to some of today’s best composers, and present...Episode details...
The opening of Edith Wharton’s novel “The Age of Innocence” takes place at New York’s old Academy of Music in the early 1870s, during a performance of Charles Gounod’s “Faust,” a French grand opera based on the classic German play by Goethe. At the time specified in Wharton’s novel, Gounod’s...Episode details...
