Rachmaninoff played his Third Concerto in January 1909 in New York, conducted by Gustav Mahler. Rachmaninoff recalled the rehearsal: Suddenly, Mahler, who had conducted this passage a tempo, tapped his desk: “Stop!  Don’t pay any attention to the difficult bowing marked in your parts. … Play the passage like this,” and he indicated a different […]

You’re travelling to another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound… but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land, whose boundaries are only that of the imagination… you’re entering… the Twilight Zone… – Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone

ARTICLES & PAPERS: PROGRAM NOTES:

“The statue is concentrated in one moment of perfection. The image stained upon the canvas posses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they know nothing of death, it is because they know nothing of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time […]

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel—or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel—is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. A person who had never known another human […]

“I may not be better than other people, but at least I’m different.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Franco-Swiss philosopher and writer.

Mozart’s musical aesthetics are revealed in a letter to his father about Osmin’s first aria in The Abduction of the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail).  The Eighteenth century classical ideals of balance and refinement are evident: I have sent you only the beginning and the end of the aria.  I think it will prove […]

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour. — Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, 1881 Stevenson, R. L. (1895). Works. United States: P. F. Collier, Vol. 2, p. 119

The Imperial Chapel Choir was founded in Vienna in 1498 and performed exclusively for the court.  Composers that worked with the choir included Musicians like Heinrich Isaac, Paul Hofhaimer, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, Johann Joseph Fux, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Antonio Caldara, Antonio Salieri and Anton Bruckner.  Schubert was a chorister.  After the dissolution of the […]