Leonidas Kavakos and Enrico Pace Play Beethoven
The Sonata #3 for violin and piano by Beethoven always reminds me of music I heard at home. My father was an amateur violinist, and when I began to play the violin, I practiced this …
Composers Archive
Lucia Popp Sings Schubert’s “An die Musik”
Franz Schubert died at age 31. Yet he was able to leave us about 600 songs scored for voice and piano. These actually began as poems by several different poets. In one such case the …
“A German Requiem” By Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms first mentioned the idea of the German Requiem in correspondence to Clara Schumann in 1865. Between 1857–1868, Brahms worked in part on elements which would appear in the Requiem. Many standard interpretations say that this was …
Who was Erich Wolfgang Korngold?
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was 50 years old at the time of the 1947 debut of his Violin Concerto in D Major, a lyrical work begun a decade earlier. The half-century mark can seem significant to …
Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin”
Le Tombeau de Couperin actually began before the war. Ravel had started the suite in 1914 with a dance, writing to Cipa Godebski, “I am transcribing a forlane by Couperin…” Later that year, Ravel wrote …