Five pieces for the Summer sunrise: Concert: First, Reis glorios (Glorious King), a 12th century alba by Guiraut de Bornelh, who was styled the ‘master of the troubadours’. The alba (Occitan) or alborada (Spanish) or aubade (French) is a dawn song. After the (hopeful, on the part of the singer, anyway) seduction of the evening […]
Tag Archives: Schönberg
A. When it’s a song cycle(??) Schönberg’s second quartet breaks boundaries. It starts respectably enough in its home key of f-sharp, and then (within the freedoms of late romantic form and chromatic harmony) proceeds in a fairly orderly quartetish manner until the end of the second movement, the scherzo; it’s then that the real revolution […]
St. Stephen’s Cathedral – the heart of Vienna: here Haydn was a chorister and later got married; here, too, Mozart married his Constanze and later christened his children; Johann Strauss the younger was also married here, while the cathedral’s register of deaths contains many illustrious musical names including those of Vivaldi and Schubert. The importance of […]
