Mahler Symphony No. 5, Part 1

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

As I've often said, I love doing Patreon-sponsored episodes in part because they allow me to discover music I might never have encountered otherwise. Today's episode is one of those, because the truth is that before I made it, I had heard of Finzi, but that was about it. I knew n ...  Show more

In the first movement of his famous symphony, Beethoven sets up a battle between hope and despair. The dark side of that spectrum is represented by the anguished opening notes of the first movement: DUN DUN DUNNN. Over the course of the next three movements, Beethoven keeps tryin ...  Show more

You know Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. You’ve heard it in films, advertisements, parodied in Saturday morning cartoons and disco-ized in Saturday Night Fever. The Fifth Symphony is a given, so much so that it blends into the background. You know this piece, but how well? Of all the ...  Show more

This is a personal arrangement of Bach's Prelude in B-flat Minor BWV 867 - The Well-Tempered Clavier, Vol 1. As I played this piece, I mentally converted it from the minor key of B-flat to the parallel major key. I did this as a demonstration of how such simple alterations in mus ...  Show more