A recollection of the London Proms in 1936: The behavior of the Promenaders was more genteel in those days … there wasn’t the same degree of shouting as now.  During the famous hornpipe in Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs people tapped with their umbrellas and sticks, rather than stamping.  As the applause went […]

“Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each […]

“The traditional sense of proportion is a hang-up. The usual Mozartean concept of how long an idea lasts becomes too predictable. Some of the composers who talk the most about avoiding predictability are the ones most victimized by this predictable traditional sense of proportion.” – Morton Feldman, American composer. Cited in: Tom Johnson, Remembrance, September […]

“There is also in this music an extraordinary sense of control over the passage of time; a moment will be held still as if suspended, and then released, with a rush.  Einstein has told us that time is relative, flexible and elastic; I have noticed these qualities whenever I have tried to play to the […]

“Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men.” – Brooke Westcott, Bishop of Durham, scholar, theologian Cited at Quotations Book

Humorists Ilf and Petrov described a concert by Rachmaninoff In New York (November 1935): The night we went to hear him he appeared tall, bent, and thin, with a long sad face, his hair closely clipped; he sat down at the piano, separated the folds of his old-fashioned back swallowtail, adjusted one of his cuffs […]

A tiny 18th-century book has turned up in Hay-on-Wye containing the earliest known version of Sweet Molly Malone, almost a century older than Dublin’s unofficial anthem. Maev Kennedy, “Tart with a cart? Older song shows Dublin’s Molly Malone in new light”, The Guardian, 18 July 2010. Click here to view article

“There is also in this [nineteenth-century romantic] music an extraordinary sense of control over the passage of time; a moment will be held still as if suspended, and then released with a rush. Einstein has told us that time is relative, flexible and elastic; I have noticed these qualities whenever I have tried to play […]

Morrell gave Handel the words of Cleopatra’s air “Convey me to some peaceful shore” in Alexander Balus, he cried out “Damn your Iambics!”. Morell offered to change them to trochees and went into the next room to do so, only to find about three minutes later that Handel had set them as they stood.” Dean, […]