10 Great Violin Concertos You Must Hear

By |2024-03-12T18:26:48-05:00March 12th, 2024|Categories: Antonin Dvorak, Audio/Video, Camille Saint-Saëns, Felix Mendelssohn, Jean Sibelius, Johannes Brahms, Music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Robert Schumann, Timeless Essays|

The fun thing about really getting to know the violin concerto repertoire is that there are always more treasures to discover. The violin concerto repertoire is so rich and satisfying, I’m embarrassed to admit that, prior to becoming an adult beginner on the violin in 2005, I was only familiar with a few of them. This, [...]

The Youngest Master: Felix Mendelssohn

By |2024-02-02T18:03:34-06:00February 2nd, 2024|Categories: Culture, Felix Mendelssohn, Music, Timeless Essays|Tags: , |

Felix Mendelssohn, for all his amazing versatility, is now remembered by a tiny handful of his works, themselves not always representative. But there is now no excuse for neglecting so many of the masterworks of a composer who was central to the art of his epoch. Mendelssohn: The Caged Spirit: A New Approach to the [...]

The Ten Most Beautiful Symphonies

By |2023-10-27T17:53:44-05:00October 27th, 2023|Categories: Antonin Dvorak, Audio/Video, Culture, Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, Gustav Mahler, Jean Sibelius, Ludwig van Beethoven, Music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

In addition to melody, great and beautiful classical symphonies must display a mastery of structure and orchestration, a command of tone color and harmony, and an expertise in developing musical ideas. Here are the ten most beautiful symphonies ever composed. “Imagination creates reality.” —Richard Wagner Though beauty is an absolute reality, we human beings see [...]

The Top Ten Greatest Violin Concertos

By |2023-03-12T20:34:42-05:00March 12th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Camille Saint-Saëns, Felix Mendelssohn, Jean Sibelius, Johannes Brahms, Ludwig van Beethoven, Music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

The violin concerto as a form of music has endured for some 300 years and remains, alongside the piano concerto, the most popular type of concerto played in modern concert halls and committed to recording. The genre was first developed during the Baroque era, when the concerto was conceived as a tripartite structure, running about fifteen [...]

Felix Mendelssohn: The Mozart of the Romantic Age

By |2023-02-02T14:50:33-06:00February 2nd, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Featured, Felix Mendelssohn, Music, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

While original in his style, Felix Mendelssohn was certainly no radical. What he offered was a perfect blending of classical proportion with Romantic fervor. In that sense, he amounts to a kind of missing link between Mozart and the remainder of the nineteenth century. Of all the underrated genius-level composers of the nineteenth century, none [...]

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