On this date in 1828, Franz Schubert attended a party at the Vienna home of one of his admirers and played some of his new piano sonata in B-flat, which he had completed only the previous day. That same month, Schubert composed one of his greatest works, the String Quintet in C Major....Episode details...
The haunting melody “September Song” by Kurt Weill was first heard by the public on today’s date in the year 1938, , during a trial run in Hartford, Connecticut, of a new musical titled “Knickerbocker Holiday.”
Kurt Weill was 38 at the time and had been in America just three years. In Europe,...Episode details...
On today’s date in 1966, the 60th birthday of composer Dimitri Shostakovich was celebrated at the Moscow Conservatory with a gala orchestral concert of his music. Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich gave the premiere performance of Shostakovich’s brand-new Second Cello Concerto, and the composer’s son,...Episode details...
In the age of the Baroque, Double Concertos were quite common: there were concertos written for two flutes, two trumpets, or, like the famous concerto by J.S. Bach, for two violins. These Double Concertos represented a civilized give-and-take between the two soloists, a sense of balance or...Episode details...
If you were a member of the European nobility, the summer of 1798 was a scary time. That revolutionary wild man Napoleon Bonaparte had crushed your armies on land and now word had it his fleet had escaped a British blockade. The possibility that Napoleon would control both land and sea struck...Episode details...
As the season begins, we offer you this “Autumn Music” — a woodwind quintet by American composer Jennifer Higdon. Higdon says she wanted to write a companion piece to another famous woodwind quintet titled “Summer Music” by Samuel Barber. Higdon’s “Autumn Music” was commissioned by Pi Kappa...Episode details...
Today’s date marks the premiere in New York City, in 1925, of a classic operetta “The Vagabond King” by Rudolf Friml, the source of many once-popular sentimental tunes, including “Love Me Tonight,” and “Only a Rose.”
Friml was born in Prague in 1879, and he studied composition there with no...Episode details...
Today’s date commemorates the death, in 1957, of the most famous Finnish composer of modern times, Jean Sibelius. Born in 1865, Sibelius studied at the University of Helsinki, developed a strong sense of nationalism in the 1890s, and achieved world fame in the first years of the 20th century. He...Episode details...
On today’s date in 2002, just a little over one year after two passenger jetliners had crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the New York Philharmonic gave the premiere performance of a new work by the American composer John Adams.
Entitled “On the...Episode details...
On this day in 1918, Russian composer Serge Prokofiev arrived in America to give a recital of his piano works in New York. He told interviewers that despite the revolution in his homeland and widespread conditions of famine, Russian musicians continued to work.
Prokofiev himself, however,...Episode details...
