Chamber Music & Recitals

When Eug?ne Ysaáe composed his cycle of 6 sonatas op. 27 for solo violin in June 1923, gut strings were still very common and highly appreciated - statements by contemporary violinists such as Mischa Elman, Toscha Seidel and Jacques Thibaud confirm this...

When Emperor Joseph II established a professional wind ensemble drawn from the Viennese court orchestra in 1782, he initiated an influential trend that gave composers an important opportunity to popularize their operatic music. The beautifully craft.1...

When Elgar' popular part-song My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land was published in 1890, a ready market for such pieces had been established by the competition festival movement, itself fuelled by the enormous growth in the number of choirs.1. There Is...

When Dornbusch plays, he doesn't necessarily do it according to the book. His maxims are: experiment, try things out and avoid repetitions if possible. "I concern myself far too little with theory. I prefer composing from my moods." Fewer notes. Just let...

When composer Philip Glass started work on his solo Piano Etudes back in 1991, his goal was "to explore a variety of tempi, textures, and piano techniques," but also, as he mentioned in a 2012 interview, to become "a better player." Ever since, the...

When composer Jenny Olivia Johnson moved to Boston in 2009 to teach at Wellesley College, she had no idea that one of her most idolized poets and authors, Sylvia Plath, had grown up in the small town of Wellesley. Learning this fact, while settling into...

When buried masterpieces are rediscovered, they hardly succeed to rewrite history. However, Bruno Maderna's Requiem per soli, cori e orchestra, unearthed sixty years after it's disappearance, may well withstand the test, and quite successfully. With all...

When Bj?rk won the 2010 Polar Music Prize, it was in recognition of her "deeply personal music and lyrics, her precise arrangements and her unique voice." Truer words couldn't be spoken for exactly why Vitamin String Quartet had to honor the Icelandic...

When Beth Levin released her third live album seven years ago, she summed up Ludwig van Beethoven's last three piano sonatas under the motto 'A Single Breath'. At the time, a critic called her a titan and wrote that she played as if she was a...

When Beethoven assigned the opus number one to his three piano trios, it was evident that the then 22-year-old composer would explore, advance and co-create the composition rules, and that he would very nearly transcend that which was comprehensible to...

When asked about three of his signature orchestral works - the Grammy-winning Become Ocean, it's sequel Become Desert, and the original source Become River (previously unreleased as an official recording until now) - composer John Luther Adams refers to...

When Anton Diabelli, wishing to promote himself as a publisher, commissioned many of the best-known composers of his time to write a variation on a theme composed by himself in 1819 in order to publish a score with all of them, he couldn't possibly...