Recent Blogs Posts

This month's installment of our #Beethoven2020 series (the penultimate installment) shares two vinyl albums from my collection - one of them completes the "piano concerto" cycle we undertook when er launched this series earlier this year.

Let's start there - Rudolf Serkin recorded all of the Beethoven concertos - some of them more than once, under Eugene Ormandy, Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein, The Bernstein collaboration on the Emperor concerto was reissued several

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This week's Tuesday Blog is a near-COver2Cover share of Henryk Szeryng's complete Mozart Violin Concerto cycle.

Back in February of 2016, I shared in these pages a vinyl pressing of two of these concerti - numbers 3 and 5. Today, we share the remaining tracks from that cycle, including three short concerto movements.

As I wrote back then, Szeryng's noble tone, flawless technique, and eloquent expressivity are wonderfully well-suited to Mozart's youthful concertos,

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Here is a story, embarrassing but funny in an ironic sort of way. Arriving in Manhattan in March 2016 to see an opera at the Met, I spotted, in Port Authority, a poster for Hamilton. Instantly, I thought—now, bear in mind that I knew absolutely nothing about the show and had never even heard of it—“A musical about Alexander Hamilton. That will never be a hit!”

I was laughably ignorant of the fact that Lin-Manuel

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Chaya Czernowin is an Israeli composer and Harvard professor with extensive experience working in a stylistic realm that draws inspiration from spectralism, free improvisation, new complexity and, most notably, sonorism. Infinite Now is an opera that was premiered in Ghent, in April, 2017, by Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, and it was this performance that was streamed on the YouTube channel OperaVision in July 2020, with the availability to watch for six months since the stream. The opera itself draws

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This week's post on our ongoing #Beethoven2020 series is a Vinyl program featuring Sviatoslav Rchter playing Beethoven's third piano concerto.

Beethoven composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 at the time when he still performed himself, his increasing deafness would soon end his career as a piano virtuoso.

A quick review of Richter's Beethoven output on record has him performing cello sonatas as accompanist, and as soloist on the piano sonatas (he probably recorded them

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