“Most performers pretty much ignore the audience – they play and go off … Don’t get me wrong. I worship these guys! But what will make someone who hardly knows about classical music listen to to Grigory Sokolov for two hours straight, and in total silence? you have to work your way up to that […]

“He accomplishes enormous difficulties, but so quietly, so smoothly and with such constant delicacy and refinement that the listener is not sensible of their real magnitude.  It is the exquisite delicacy, with the liquid mellowness of his tone, and the pearly roundness of his passages of rapid articulation which are the peculiar features of his […]

Now the nature of man consists in this, that his will strives, is satisfied and strives anew, and so on for ever. Indeed, his happiness and well-being consist simply in the quick transition from wish to satisfaction, and from satisfaction to a new wish. For the absence of satisfaction is suffering, the empty longing for […]

My love for Schubert is a very serious one, probably because it is no fleeting fancy. Where is genius like his, which soars heavenwards so boldly and surely, where we see the few supreme ones enthroned. He is to me like a son of the gods, playing with Jupiter’s thunder, and also occasionally handling it […]

Title: Prayer of Thanksgiving to the Trinity Text: St. Catherine’s Dialogue on Divine Providence Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Concert band (Flt. 1 & 2, Cl. 1 & 2, Alt. Sax., Ten. Sax., Bar. Sax., Trpt 1 & 2, trb, tub., perc.) Product medium: PDF score and parts     Related products:     – Prayer of Thanksgiving to the […]

Stewart Warkov, assistant manager of the Symphony of The Air in 1961 described Stokowski playing Bach on the organ: Stokowski played Bach on the organ for me, each time one of the great pieces he had arranged. The sound, the phrasing, and the registration, the ritards and the accelerandos, gave me the impression of hearing […]

In a letter to his friend Abbé Joseph Bullinger, Mozart jokes about the musical environment in Salsburg. One of his subjects is the search for an additional final principle singer. “I can hardly believe it!” he wrote “A female singer!? When we have so many already! – and all of them first rate…” (1). Mozart […]

“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” — Edgar Allan Poe

“Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.” – Paul Johannes Tillich, German American theologian and philosopher

“All theory is grey, but the precious tree of life is green.” Maurice Ravel to Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, describing Schoenberg’s intellectualism.  Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous (Geneva, 1945), p. 104.  Cited in:  Nichols, Roger (1987) Ravel Remembered.  London: Faber & Faber., p. 61.