Beethoven’s revised version of Fidelio was due to be premiered on the 23rd May 1814. Beethoven had planned to write a new overture for the performance. He was still yet to complete it before the final rehearsal on the 22nd May. The night before, he was dining out with his physician (Dr. Bertolini). After dinner, he took a menu, […]

Theatre director Herbert Wernicke has taken six of Bach’s Cantatas dealing with the frailty of the human condition and presented them in a staging of mundane human activities.  Albrecht Puhlmann, the general director of Stuttgart Opera, states that “From the woman with the baby to the coffin being carried out, life and death is being […]

It was in the eventful year, then, of 1813—the year of “Il Figlio per Azzardo”, with its obbligato accompaniment for lamp-shades of “Tancredi” and of “L’Italiana in Algeri”—that Rossini was writing one morning in bed, when the duet on which he was engaged fell from his hands. “Nothing easier”, an ordinary composer would say, “than […]

The relativity of all these key-colour associations was illustrated during a debate on the whole subject organised in London in 1886 by the Journal “Musical Opinion”. That section of the audience that maintained the definite existence of “key colour” by which it could aurally identify a key was submitted to a test, a well known […]

Title: Advance Australia FairComposer: Peter Dodds McCormickArranger: Greg SmithInstrumentation: SATB and pianoProduct medium: PDF score and part Available from:Sheet Music Direct

(i) Humoresque I (ii) Song (iii) Little Waltz (iv) Humorous March (v) Impromptu “Never write an unnecessary note. Every note must live”.1 — Sibelius The miniature is the perfect genre to master this philosophy. Sibelius wrote the Opus 97 Bagatelles in 1920, in between his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. The quirky nature of these Bagatelles […]

Funnily, my deep conviction is that no idea or concept of true artistic importance can be imparted or transferred. The real things are those that you grow yourself in your own garden, without anyone overseeing. In that sense art is the land of absolute sole responsibility. There is nothing that cannot be challenged, but in […]

Title: Merlin the Wizard Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Duet Level: 2 Product medium: PDF score

“John Cage once said he couldn’t abide the Dominant Seventh, and the saxophone.” Ned Rorem (2000) Lies: A Diary 1986-1999.  Cambridge: MA: Da Capo Press, p.65.

George Plimpton, a writer and sportsman, asked if he could play in the New York Philharmonic for a month to write about the workings of an orchestra.  Leonard Bernstein assigned him to the percussion section.  The principal percussionist, Walter Rosenberg, recalled his experience: During rehearsals I would lean over and point to where we were […]