Composers Archive

I had planned for you today a wonderful program of Romantic music by Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Edvard Grieg. In particular the Grieg brings out the folk tunes of Norway as part of the composer’s …

Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 was composed in 1916–17, and premiered the following year, just before the composer left his politically explosive homeland for an extended residence in the US and Western Europe. The symphony would …

Pianist Igor Levit was born in Russia in 1987, and his parents relocated to Germany when Igor was age 8. He began his piano studies with his mother. As the youngest participant in the 2005 Arthur …

Dvořák composed his piano concerto from late August through 14 September 1876. While working on the concerto, Dvořák himself realized that he had not created a virtuosic piece in which the piano does battle with …

Sergei Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto, completed in the summer of 1917 amid the turmoil of the Russian Revolution, begins somewhere up in the clouds with an expansive, gradually-unfolding melody in the solo violin. Woodwind voices …