Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8

We humans seem to love comeback stories, and there is no comeback quite as compelling in the classical music world as Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. It was written three years after the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony, a premiere so catastrophic that it lives on ...  Show more

A piece that I have been asked to cover probably a dozen times is Handel's Messiah. It's a piece I love, but a piece that I've never conducted or played, and so therefore I don't know it incredibly well. There are plenty of pieces like this in the repertoire, and so I've decided ...  Show more

Synopsis There are dozens of famous cello concertos that get performed in concert halls these days, ranging from 18th century works by Italian Baroque master Antonio Vivaldi to dramatic 20th century works of Russian modernist Dmitri Shostakovich. American composer Sean Hickey was ...  Show more

Synopsis A concerto, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is “a piece for one or more soloists and orchestra with three contrasting movements.” And for most classical music fans, “concerto” means one of big romantic ones by Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, works in which there is a kind o ...  Show more

Synopsis There’s a long list of composers ranging from Vivaldi to Messiaen who have incorporated bird song into their musical works. Today we make note of one of them. On this date in 1893, great Czech composer Antonín Dvořák was vacationing with his family in Spillville, Iowa, s ...  Show more

How Mozart's Requiem, written when he was dying, has touched and changed people's lives. Crime writer Val McDermid recalls how this music helped her after the loss of her father. Hypnotist Athanasios Komianos recounts how the piece took him to the darker side of the spirit world. ...  Show more