Lili Boulanger: Psalm 130
The story of Lili Boulanger's life is one of the most fascinating and tragic in all of musical history. A remarkably precocious talent, Boulanger learned to read sheet music before the alphabet, playe...
16 Apr 46min
Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 (Part 2)
In a letter to Tchaikovsky's nephew Vladimir Davydov, Tchaikovsky wrote: "I'm very pleased with its content, but dissatisfied, or rather not completely satisfied, with the instrumentation. For some re...
2 Apr 48min
Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 (Part 1)
The great and somewhat controversial conductor Leopold Stokowski said this about Tchaikovsky: "His musical utterance comes directly from the heart and is a spontaneous expression of his innermost feel...
21 Mar 50min
Beethoven String Quartet, Op. 59, No.2
I'm always tickled by composer trivia questions, like which standard canon works begin in a major key and end in a minor key? I'll give you one, but please comment others below: Mendelssohn's 4th Symp...
5 Mar 56min
Brahms Symphony No. 2 LIVE w/ The Aalborg Symphony
Brahms spent much of his adult life battling with his ambition to write the next great symphony and his terror at the shadow of Beethoven standing behind him. Brahms tortured himself for 14 years with...
19 Feb 58min
Zemlinsky: The Mermaid
The story of Alexander von Zemlinsky's The Mermaid begins with a passionate love affair and ends in heartbreak of the most unabashedly big-R Romantic kind. In 1900, the young, fabulously talented, and...
5 Feb 1h 1min
Pergolesi Stabat Mater
Many aspects of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's life seem relatively normal when it comes to composers of the Baroque era. He was prolific, died young, and his music became very famous only after his de...
22 Jan 59min
Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2
We humans seem to love comeback stories, and there is no comeback quite as compelling in the classical music world as Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. It was written three years after the disastr...
8 Jan 52min
