In essence

1669 Posts
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The Last Rose of Summer
Stevenson, Beethoven, Ries and Ernst
As summer is stormily giving way to autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, and the next corona lockdown is just around the corner, we still fondly remember those warm and carefree summer days. The passing of the seasons and a deep
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Everyone Wants a Goldberg
J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations (Glenn Gould) We were thinking about Bach’s Goldberg Variations the other evening. Written, as related by Bach’s biographer Johann Forkel, for the ill and often sleepless Count Kaiserling, who wished for some night music that was
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Taking an Old Idea Further: Strauss’ Aus Italien
The lure of Italy to those who live in cold Northern Europe cannot be understated. Composer after composer went south and brought back their musical memories of that country of sunshine and warmth, of folksong and dance, and of landscapes
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Condemned by a Kiss: Stravinsky’s Le baiser de la fée
Stravinsky’s ballet Le baiser de la fée gives us the life of a child fated to a bad end by a desirous fairy. Composed in 1928 for Diaghilev and created for the prima ballerina Ida Rubinstein, the ballet tells of
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The Losses of Another War: Bax’ In Memoriam
A work from 1916 entitled In memoriam would normally be assumed to be work commemorating the losses of World War I. This work by English composer Arnold Bax, however, is for a different struggle – the armed uprising in Ireland
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A Work Symbolic of the World: Alexander Tchaikovsky’s Quarantine Symphony
For composer Alexander Tchaikovsky (b. 1946), it wasn’t the thought of doing his 9th symphony that was the difficult mountain to meet, it was the sixth and seventh. Having completed his sixth symphony (and remembering that the sixth symphony was
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Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Peanuts Gallery
Widely considered the most influential cartoonists of all time, Charles Schulz (1922-2000) created the “Peanuts” in 1950. This most famous of all comic strips ran for 50 years, with 17,897 original strips published in all. It appeared in over 2,600
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A New Orchestral Sound: Martinaitytė’s Saudade
We’re used to the classical orchestral sound – the violins, the winds, the mostly ignored lower brass. Žibuoklė Martinaitytė (b. 1973), a Lithuanian composer currently based in New York, uses the symphony orchestra as her instrument of many voices –
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