When Handel travelled through Chester, on his way to Ireland, this year, 1741 (to give the first performance of Messiah), I was at the Public School in that city and very well remember seeing him [Handel] smoke a pipe, over a dish of coffee, at the Exchange Coffee House; for being extremely curious to see […]

James Huneker, a critic with the New York Courier, wrote about the impact of Brahms’ music on him: Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the infinite. A dazzling, dry light floods his mind, and you hear the rustling of wings – wings of great terrifying monsters; hippogrifs of horrid mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces […]

TITLE: Your Words, Lord, are Spirit and Life TEXT: Psalm 18 (19): 8-10, 15 COMPOSER: Greg Smith INSTRUMENTATION: SATB and piano PRODUCT MEDIUM: PDF score and part SAMPLE:

Gustav Mahler recalled: After an illness, Bruckner was ordered by his doctor to take a daily hip-bath.  Loath to waste time, he would take music paper and compose while in the tub.  While absorbed in his work one day, the mother of Rudolf Kryzanowski, one of his pupils, knocked at the door.  “Come in!” called […]

“I say that in the aria ‘La donna è mobile’, for example, which the elite thinks only brilliant and superficial, there is more substance and feeling than in the whole of Wagner’s Ring cycle.” – Igor StravinskyCited in Brandenburg, Daniel (2012). Verdi: Rigoletto. Bärenreiter.

Title: To a friend Composer: Greg Smith Text: James Fenimore Cooper Jr. Instrumentation: TTBB Product medium: PDF score Sample:

Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, after running into some problems with his accommodation, was spending a cold November day in the Tiergarten, Berlin, in 1923. Throughout the course of the day, he was approached by Paul Bose to play Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. It began to rain. In Moscow it probably is snowing now, I thought absently, making […]

Title: On the day I call for help Text: Psalm 137 (138): 1-3, 6-8. R. v.3 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:    

In his Beethoven: Biography of a Genius, Marek provides an insight into Beethoven as a boy: The boy was looking out of the window, his head cradled in his hands.  His mien was serious, his glance rigid. Cäcilia Fischer came along the courtyard and saw him. “How are you, Ludwig?” she shouted up to him.  […]

Vaughan Williams gave a broadcast talk on Bach entitled “Bach the Great Bourgeois.” It was later published in The Listener. Vaughan Williams, who was involved in performances of works such as Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion as part of the Leith Hill Festival, offered some insight in contemporary approaches to Bach performance: WHEN I was a […]