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This week’s “Fifth Tuesday” quarterly podcast is dedicated to Rachmaninov’s Etudes-Tableaux, a curious mix of pianistic prowess and impressionism “à la sauce Russe”. There are 17 of these studies, eight in a set dating 1911, and nine in a later set from 1916-17. This latter set is presented today in its entirety.

To make my “impressionist” case, look no further than the five studies that Ottorino Respighi orchestrated and that are part of this week’s montage. Each

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For the third and final installment in our abbreviated look at Beethoven piano sonatas, let’s turn to a pianist who made the first-ever recording of the entire corpus, and evaluate how well these interpretations have stood the test of time.

Artur Schnabel (1882 –1951) was an Austrian-born classical pianist, composer and pedagogue. Among the 20th century's most respected and important pianists, Schnabel has few equals, especially in the Austro-German classics, particularly the

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What do Maxim Vengerov, Sir Yehudi Mnuhon and Nigel Kennedy have in common? They are all renowned violinists who traded their violin for a viola in a recording of William Walton's viola concerto. Today’s Cover2Cover share, my last in that series before mu annual summer hiatus, is a 1987 coupling of Walton’s viola and violin concerti featuring Kennedy as soloist with the Royal Philharmonic under Andre Previn.

The pair of concertante works are workhorses of 20th-century British repertoire,

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Today's PTB Classic post is the second set of Beethoven sonatas in out three part series, which we also trust to Glenn Gould. Last month, we considered five sonatas, this week three sonatas, recorded in 1973 and 1983, respectively.

The 1983 digital recording is that of the "Funeral March" sonata, amd the last two (from 1973) are two of the three sonatas from the op. 31 set.

As we discussed the aesthetic around Gould's approach on Beethoven as part of last month's post,

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To conclude our three-part look at Schumann’s symphonies, I chose my favorite of his, the Rheinish. It was composed in1850, the same year that he completed his Cello Concerto (which was published four years later).

Schumann was inspired to write the symphony after a trip to the Rhineland with his wife Clara. This journey was a happy and peaceful trip; he incorporated elements of the journey and portrayed other experiences from his life in the music.

There are two forces

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