Chamber Music & Recitals

When his pupil, the Infanta Maria Barbara married the heir to the Spanish throne, Domenico Scarlatti travelled with her from Lisbon to Madrid, a move that led to the completion of hundreds of single-movement sonatas or exercises. Designed for her to...

When he moved away from serial techniques at the end of the 1960s, having undergone something of a spiritual and artistic transformation, Arvo P?rt turned to the choral tradition of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance for inspiration. From this period of...

When he died in July 1750, Bach left tantalisingly unfinished his final masterpiece, The Art of Fugue. He had been composing and compiling it during the last decade of his life, alongside several other compendious projects such as the Mass in B minor and...

When Handel composed his Judas Maccabaeus in 1746 he had brought to an end his activity for the (Italian) opera in London and begun a second career as an oratorio composer, which at first got off to a very successful start but then soon experienced a...

When Glenn Gould performed his last public piano recital in Los Angeles on April 10, 1964, he included Ernst Kreneck's Piano Sontata No. 3 alongside works of Bach. This is a clear indication of Kreneck's significance as a twentieth-century composer. This...

When Giovanni Benedetto Platti was born, Johann Sebastian Bach was already twelve years old, and when he died, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was only two weeks short of his seventh birthday. So far scholars have not been able to unearth any significant...

When Gina Bachauer made her first gramophone recordings in 1949, she could already look back on an impressive career. Alfred Cortot and Sergey Rachmaninoff were among her teachers; Dimitri Mitropoulos conducted her first public concert in Athens in 1935,...

When Giacomo Puccini received an offer from Vienna "to write an opera - yes: similar to Der Rosenkavalier, only more entertaining and more organic," he replied, "An operetta, that for me is out of the question." What the composition became is La rondine-...

When Germany invaded Austria in 1938, Robert Furstenthal, born in 1920, took the path of many Viennese Jews and fled to the United States, where he made his living as an accountant; the fact that he had written music in his youth was soon forgotten...

When George Gershwin presented his Rhapsody in Blue at Manhattan's Aeolian Hall in 1924, Jazz had prized it's way into the classical concert halls. Only one year later the Concerto in F followed - the motifs and themes 'jazzy', whilst bearing all the...

When four musicians of high caliber join forces, one can generally expect favorable results; but only the truly splendid manage to create a musical experience greater than the sum of it's parts. Such is the nature of The Opus Project, founded in 2020 and...

When examining the instrumental statistics for Aulis Sallinen's overall oeuvre, we see that in quantitative terms he has preferred the violoncello above all other solo instruments, and a constant that uniformly pervades his chamber compositions is his...