Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 (Part 1)

I'm always tickled by composer trivia questions, like which standard canon works begin in a major key and end in a minor key? I'll give you one, but please comment others below: Mendelssohn's 4th Symphony. Well, how about this one: how many of Beethoven's 16 string quartets end i ...  Show more

Brahms spent much of his adult life battling with his ambition to write the next great symphony and his terror at the shadow of Beethoven standing behind him. Brahms tortured himself for 14 years with his first symphony, and only published it when he was 49 years old. But when th ...  Show more

Synopsis On today’s date in 1893, French composer Lili Boulanger was born in Paris. In 1913, when she was 20, Boulanger became the first woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome for her cantata Faust and Helen, an achievement which was headline news in those days. Her father, Er ...  Show more

Synopsis The hills surrounding the Austrian town of Salzburg, according to Rogers and Hammerstein, are “alive with the sound of music.” Well, the same could have been said for the vast interior and multiple choir lofts of Salzburg Cathedral on today’s date in 1682 when a lavish c ...  Show more

Synopsis According to Wikipedia, an art song is “a vocal music composition, usually written for one voice with piano accompaniment … often a musical setting of an independent poem or text intended for the concert repertory as part of a recital.” The 600-plus art songs of the Vien ...  Show more

Synopsis It might seem odd that during his long career, Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály wrote only nine works for orchestra. When someone asked him about this, he replied, “I was busy with more important work: I had to educate a public.” Kodály and his countryman Béla Bartók wer ...  Show more