Each summer the BBC organizes the biggest classical music festival in the world, namely the BBC Proms, which stretches from mid-July to early September, offering dozens of orchestral concerts, chamber and solo recitals, choral performances, and both early and brand-new music, including...Episode details...
If pressed to name a famous 20th century Danish composer, most concert-goers would say, “Carl Nielsen” – after all, he wrote five symphonies that get performed every now and then. But if pressed to name a 20th century Danish composer who wrote thirteen symphonies, not many would be able to say,...Episode details...
In the 19th century, anybody who had the means would flee the stifling heat of the cities and head for someplace green and shady and cool: a country house, a spa perhaps, or maybe just a cabin in the woods. Of course, these days you just crank up the air-conditioning. THAT wasn't an option until...Episode details...
The month of August in 1613 proved to be an especially eventful one in the life and career of Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi. The previous summer, his old employer, Duke Vincenzo of Mantua, had died, and Monteverdi was laid off by the Duke's successor. The composer cooled his heels in...Episode details...
In 1980, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, his wife, and his two sons emigrated from his Soviet-controlled homeland and settled in Austria. Since the 1960's, Pärt's increasingly spiritual and overtly religious music, imbued with mystical and contemplative rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church,...Episode details...
In the 1950s, if you said the words "Cuban music," perhaps Desi Arnez, a.k.a. Ricky Ricardo, singing "Babaloo" might come to mind. These days, it's more likely the Buena Vista Social Club.
On today's date back in 1932, George Gershwin had Cuban music on his mind when the New York Philharmonic...Episode details...
When spaceman Michael Rennie's flying saucer circled over Washington, DC, in the 1951 sci-fi classic, "The Day the Earth Stood Still," it did so to the accompaniment of an electronic instrument known as the Theremin. Its Russian inventor, Leon Theremin, was born in St. Petersburg on today's date...Episode details...
There was a time when German opera houses would have fought over the chance to premiere a brand-new opera by Richard Strauss. But by 1940, when Strauss finished a mythological opera entitled "The Love of Danae," there was a war on, and, on top of that, Strauss had fallen out of favor with...Episode details...
It's said that Nature abhors a vacuum—and so, apparently, did Richard Wagner, who devised a brass instrument to bridge a gap he perceived between the horns and the trombones in the orchestra of his day. And so the "Wagner tuba" was born, a brass instrument Wagner designed for the 1876 premiere of...Episode details...
