Elgar Cello Concerto

When it comes to a piece like the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, a few words or phrases regularly come up: the concerto is described as "mellow" or Mozart's "swan song," but most often it is described as "perfect." Such a perfect piece as Mozart's Clarinet Concerto must have been huge ...  Show more

It took a lot to make the composer and critic Virgil Thomson happy. He was famous for savaging new works he didn't like, and the truth is, he didn't like very many new works at all. One exception was Bohuslav Martinů's very first symphony, written in 1942. Thomson said this: "The ...  Show more

A Violin Concerto in G minor, Opus 26, became the best-known work of the German composer Max Bruch. Originally written in 1866, it went through many revisions before finally being completed in 1867. It was performed extensively but having sold both the publishing and the manuscri ...  Show more

Series exploring famous pieces of music and their emotional appeal.When Mendelssohn wrote his Violin Concerto in 1844 he could hardly have imagined how famous and well loved it would become. In this programme, people tell how it has played an important part in their lives. Violin ...  Show more

<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 ...

Written by Joaquin Rodrigo in 1939, the Concierto de Aranjuez is a guitar classic. He wrote it amid the chaos of the Spanish Civil War, and in circumstances of poverty and personal tragedy. How has it touched and changed people's lives? The composer's daughter Cecilia Rodrigo exp ...  Show more