The lure of South America in the late 19th- and early 20th-century resulted in the South American craze in France starting in the 1910s. Brazilian dancers and orchestras travelled to Europe and Europeans travelled back. French composers such as Darius

We interviewed digital performer and arranger Francis Gorgé in February 2022 and now look at this recording as our Music of the Week. In Debussy’s Préludes, Book I, the second piece has the title Voiles, which can be translated as

Before Schubert, works for piano four-hands were associated with music for amateurs to be played at home. Music that was too much for one player was easier with more hands helping. The work’s title, Fantasie, although given in French, has

We now think that the Glass Harmonica is simply an instrument with an otherworldly tone, but at its heyday in the late 17th century, it was an instrument that some thought could drive you mad. Musical Glasses, or glasses filled

Franz Schubert was in dire straits in the mid-1820s. He was very ill and this seems to have crept into his music. His String Quartet No. 14 in D minor was called ‘the most morose instrumental work’ in the Viennese

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) wrote hundreds of songs but started only 13 symphonies and completed only seven of them. And yet, it is his Symphony No. 8, known as the Unfinished that remains as one of his most popular orchestral works.

Carnival, the festive season that occurs in the Christian calendar before Lent, was used by Robert Schumann (1810-1856) as the inspiration for his work Carnaval, Op. 9, written in 1834 and 1835. In 21 short pieces, Schumann created a world

The symphonic poem had been created by Liszt as an orchestral work, usually in one movement, that takes another work, such as a poem, a short story, a novel, a painting, a landscape, or some other non-musical source, as its