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My music note for this week will be short. I don’t feel I did justice to Grieg’s Second Piano Concerto in B minor with the recordings I shared. I found a much better recording. I have been listening to it ..
Edvard Grieg stood only 5 feet tall. When this is your height and your only other talent is that you are a gifted piano player, and you are growing up in Norway – a cold, mountainous country of fjords; long, unkind winters; ..
If the word Bach instantly puts you to sleep; if you relate Baroque music to the word boring, I can relate to your sentiment, as I used to feel the same way. But Bach’s Piano Concerto in D minor was the piece that really ..
Today I am going to share with you a very short piece, “Kojo No Tsuki” (“Moon Over Ruined Castle”) by Japanese composer Rentaro Taki, who lived a tragically short life. Taki graduated music school in Tokyo ..
“You have to listen to Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number 21, part 2.” Those were my father’s words. He just heard it on the radio and could not wait to tell me about it. This was over twenty-five years ago, but I still ..
I’ve been forcing myself to listen to 20th-century classical music composers. My parents mostly listened to music of the Classical era (1750-1820 – Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven) and of the Romantic era (1820-1910 – think ..
Today I want to share with you Piano Concerto in G minor by Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904), a Czech composer. This is the only piano concerto Dvorak composed. According to Dvorak, in this concerto he was unable to create ..
Today I want to share with you aria from Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers. Bizet was a French composer, most famous for his opera Carmen. Every artist should really focus on pleasing himself with his work; the public ..
Last time I talked about Shostakovich I said, “His music tells stories. We just don’t know what those stories are. Each of his symphonies could have been turned into a Fantasia type of movie.” Well, my lovely wife ..
I was doing my usual thing: reading and listening to Spotify playing random classical music in the background. Suddenly my attention was captured by a soft, light, bright, incredibly romantic piano, accompanied by the gentle ..