Mahler Symphony No. 2, Part 3

Rachmaninoff's relationship with the symphony as a genre was famously complicated. The catastrophic premiere of his First Symphony is legendary: a badly prepared orchestra, a possibly drunk conductor, and critics who were ready to plunge a knife into the young composer's self-con ...  Show more

When the great pianist and composer Frederic Chopin decided to write a piano sonata in 1837, fashions had turned against the genre itself. Perhaps it was a feeling that Beethoven had essentially "finished" the genre, or perhaps it was a sense that a non-Germanic composer couldn't ...  Show more

Ludwig van Beethoven's Second Symphony came at a pivot point in his life. Musically, the composer moved toward the more epic, revolutionary style that would define his later symphonies. Personally, Beethoven sank into despair as his hearing loss worsened. 

With the "Eroica," Ludwig van Beethoven expanded the idea of what a symphony could be. The man who helped inspire the symphony? Napoleon Bonaparte. 

<span>Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax have both been playing Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 3 in A Major for over forty years. But it took a global pandemic for the two of them to fully understand it. “This is such open, hopeful music,” Ax said. But when Beethoven dedicated the original ...