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Any serious fan of Broadway musicals has no doubt heard that the three greatest overtures are those for Gypsy, Funny Girl, and Candide. It is true that these overtures are all uncommonly creative in their blending of melodies from the respective shows’ scores, though I half-suspect the Candide one is “the greatest” mainly because Leonard Bernstein wrote it. De rigeur for Broadway musicals since the 1920’s at least, the overture fell somewhat out of fashion from the 1960’s onward; Charles

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This week’s Vinyl’s Revenge completes our look at the TIME LIFE collection of Mozart’s last ten piano concertos, with nos. 20, 24 and 26.

Two pianists featured this week merit some introduction. Karl Engel (1923 - 2006) was a Swiss pianist. He trained in Basel and Paris and distinguished himself as an accompanist, often appearing in Lieder recitals with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Hermann Prey, Peter Schreier and Brigitte Fassbaender. Among his chamber music partners were the cellist

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This week, Vinyl’s Revenge resumes a thread we first explored a few years back – sharing tracks from a Time-Life Records anthology set called “Mozart: The Late Piano Concertos”.

In past installments, we shared concertos 18, 21, 22 and 25. In a pair of posts this Fall, we will share the remaining concertos, thanks to the addition of these works to YouTube through their partnership with the major record labels.

Piano concerto #19 is part of Ashkenazy’s Decca mid- to

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This week we resume our Tuesday Blog post-summer hiatus with a Cover 2 Cover playlist that serves as our Berlioz Year contribution, marking as many did the 150th anniversary of the composer’s death.

Berlioz’s compositions represent the epitome of the romantic period, sometimes with epic works, sometimes with works that explore the complexity of human emotions – most notably his own struggles within his relationships. No doubt, the short set of overtures proposed today put all

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We continue the article from 1928:

The undoubted imprint of the wide element of Schubert’s work is also reflected in Russian music, originating from Glinka, one who lived in the first half of the 19th century and whose name Anton Rubinstein, in his famous book included among the five world geniuses.
It is quite possible, however, that this community of some highlights in Schubert and in Glinka’s operas is purely random, because Glinka hardly had the opportunity to hear

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