Donate now to support your one-stop classical music destination

Your contribution powers the wonder of classical music
Donate
Latest

Composers Datebook®

with host John Birge

Joan Tower's Angels

Angel Fire is a village in the New Mexico Rockies that hosts an annual chamber music festival. To celebrate their 25th anniversary, Music from Angel Fire commissioned the American composer Joan Tower to write them a new work, which she titled “Angels”–a virtuosic String Quartet, her fourth,...Episode details...

  Play

Barber's "scandalous" Overture

On today’s date in 1933, the Philadelphia Orchestra was performing at its summer home at Robin Hood Dell. Conductor Alexander Smallens led the world premiere performance of a new work by a 23-year-old composer named Samuel Barber. It was his first orchestral composition to have a major public...Episode details...

  Play

Saariaho at the Proms

Say the phrase “BBC Proms” to most music lovers, and they’ll conjure up a mental image of the rowdy “Last Night of the Proms” at which normally staid and reserved Britons don funny hats and make rude noises during Sir Henry Wood’s arrangement of British sailor songs. But the raucous “Last Night...Episode details...

  Play

Gershwin's operatic flop

The life story of George Gershwin usually runs something like this: an incredible string of successes cut short by Gershwin’s tragically early death. But on today’s date in 1922, Gershwin suffered one of his rare flops when his one-act opera “Blue Monday” opened and closed on the same day. For...Episode details...

  Play

Before you go...

Who’s who and what’s what is our specialty at Composers Datebook. Take 2 minutes to make a gift today, to help us continue to share this musical education experience.

Rameau's "Pygmalion"

Around this time in 1956, the hot ticket on Broadway was for a musical based on the old Greek legend of Pygmalion, a sculptor so good that he fell in love with one of his beautiful female statues. The playwright, George Bernard Shaw, had updated the legend to modern-day London, and in 1956, the...Episode details...

  Play

Martinu's "Frescoes"

Piero della Francesca was a 15th century Renaissance painter, whose series of frescoes entitled “Legend of the True Cross” inspired one of the best orchestral works of a 20th-century Czech composer named Bohuslav Martinu. In 1952, Martinu made a trip to the Tuscan hill town of Arezzo, where he...Episode details...

  Play

Bernstein asks a musical question in Moscow

On today’s date in 1959, Leonard Bernstein celebrated his 41st birthday in Moscow. The New York Philharmonic was embarked on an extensive world tour, which included three weeks in the Soviet Union. Their August 25th concert proved controversial, offering two works of Igor Stravinsky, a composer...Episode details...

  Play

Claude Goudimel, Huguenot

We tend to think OUR time has had a monopoly on bitter religious conflicts, but on today’s date in 1572, which happened to be St. Bartholomew’s Day, the Catholic queen dowager of France, Catherine de Medici, and her son, King Charles IX, decided that the best way to rid their kingdom of...Episode details...

  Play

Before you go...

Who’s who and what’s what is our specialty at Composers Datebook. Take 2 minutes to make a gift today, to help us continue to share this musical education experience.

Hadley, Thompson, et al. in the Berkshires

Tanglewood is one of America’s most famous summer-time classical music festivals and can boast a long and impressive list of premieres and performances by famous American composers and conductors. It takes place each year around this time in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Tanglewood...Episode details...

  Play

Dali and Bejart and Alessandro Scarlatti in Venice

Opera-goers today often lament the rise of intrusive stage directors who feel the need to reinterpret a composer’s work in startling and often deliberately provocative ways. One recent staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Bayreuth Festival, for example, featured the chorus dressed up as...Episode details...

  Play