Compared to their more populous cousins for piano or violin, cello concertos are relatively thin on the ground. There are, for example, no cello concertos by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bartók, Brahms or Tchaikovsky. But what the cello repertoire lack in quantity it certainly make up for in quality: think of the Haydn (two of them […]
No-one can resist the ravages of time and, as you can tell, the difference between ages 22 and 65 was, in the case of Alexander Glazunov, of some significance. (The pose is interesting: is it an habitual stance or is the older man consciously imitating the famous Ilya Repin portrait of him that you see […]
There are people who, through some flaw or other in their personality, acquire a bad reputation, a reputation which then proceeds to dog them throughout history to the detriment of several other sterling qualities: one such is poor Anatoly Lyadov. He wasn’t poor, not in the pecuniary sense, anyway. A scion of a well-to-do St.Petersburg […]
No, it’s not procrastination I’m thinking of, it’s Rachmaninoff. Tempo rubato translates as ‘robbed or stolen time’ and is the performance practice of slowing down or speeding up a phrase in music, mostly without any indication from the composer that such tempo alterations are required. For the classically minded it’s known (pejoratively) as ‘pulling the […]
At the age of 76 Fauré composed his final essay in the subtle art of lieder mélodie writing. The work was a cycle of just four poems, entitled L’horizon chimérique (translations here). He chose to set the work of a poet – Jean de La Ville de Mirmont – who, like so many young men of […]
Can you think of a famous late nineteenth/early twentieth century French piano sonata? If you drew a blank, don’t worry, it’s not all that surprising – the list of composers who didn’t write one reads like a Who’s-Who of French music of the fin de siècle: Gounod, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Chabrier, Fauré, Chausson, Debussy, Satie, Ravel […]
There are certain poems that attract composers like bees to flowers; one such is Paul Verlaine’s La lune blanche. A quick song tally arrived at a total of at least 137(!) different settings of the poem, and that’s just in the original French – there were lots more that had been set in translation. Here […]
