FOR Jordi Savall — early-music pioneer and master of the viola da gamba — music is always more than fleeting sounds. It enfolds histories. It reflects worlds. To draw a distinction between musicology and the sheer joy of performance is next to impossible.
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Forget Old Europe. Contemporary classical music takes its cues from around the globe. When it comes to classical music, for most people Europe is the epicentre of the tradition. If asked to imagine the sound world of a Russian piece for, say, violin and piano, it would not be a stretch to think of beautiful sweeping melodies accompanied by lush harmonies on the piano, a la Tchaikovsky.
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AN Australian musician has become possibly the world’s greatest guitar teacher after placing his lessons on YouTube. Justin Sandercoe’s free online tutorials for beginner guitar players have been viewed more than 60 million times in the past four years.
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It fuses intricate classical music compositions and the simplistic iconography of a PlayStation. It allows the most unmusical people to play Beethoven in minutes. It has caused a revolution in how music is taught across Europe. And now it is making waves in Scottish schools.
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In 1890 a 13-year-old Spanish musical prodigy, Pablo Casals, was rummaging through a second-hand sheet-music store in Barcelona. He stumbled across a tattered copy of six cello suites by Johann Sebastian Bach. These pieces, written in the 1720s, had long been obscure. But for the young Pablo, their melodic beauty was audible.
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In an interview last April, before his performance of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at London’s Covent Garden, the noted opera and orchestral conductor Semyon Bychkov stated: “You start trying to be faithful to a composer’s score but great masterpieces give you enormous possibilities for interpretation. You can serve the music without being subservient.” The statement of St. Augustine could apply: “Love God and do what you will.”
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Odd, the pianist Kirill Gerstein thought. A music critic from Houston was coming to interview him in Jacksonville, Fla. Mr. Gerstein’s manager had arranged the meeting, at the Omni Hotel’s J bar, to coincide with a run of concerts last November. Might as well meet the writer, the pianist thought.
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Florian Leonhard, a London violin dealer, keeps a large fossilised ammonite in his showroom. It echoes the scroll on a fiddle’s neck, but it also has symbolic significance: violin-making, he says, is a “fossil profession”. He has a point.
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The problem with playing string quartets is you need four string players in a room. Leonardo da Vinci figured out a solution: a hybrid of a keyboard and bowed string instrument, a mythical beast like the griffin, part eagle and part lion.
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It may be the wood, the glue or the shape — but experts have long suspected that the real secret of the cherished Stradivarius violin’s special sound lay in its gleaming varnish.
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