@Anna’s

The interactions of Corelli, Scarlatti and Handel described above give the impression of a sort of generational gap.

Alessandro Scarlatti was first and foremost a composer for voice, and with good reason.

“We still play Corelli, I fancy,” Cambridge music professor Edward Dent mused in 1904, “because his music is not only beautiful, but easy too– a somewhat rare combination.”

In the context of baroque and Classical music, where a composer’s country of origin is strongly identified with their compositional style, George Frideric Handel is a rare chimera of musical identity.

It is thanks to Beethoven that any composer who has written eight symphonies, and is in a position to consider embarking upon a ninth, finds themselves staring down a giant.

The image of Beethoven towards the end of his life– the tempestuous deaf maestro, alone in his singular mastery of the universe of sound– is today so strong on the public consciousness that it is easy to forget that Beethoven was once a frightened young m…

For anyone looking for a metric by which to judge when you’ve truly made it in the world, look no further than the genesis of Jean Sibelius’ 5th Symphony: when you are paid by the government to produce your own birthday present, to celebrate the newly dec…

The Vltava river runs 430 kilometers through the Czech Republic.

One of the primary faults of cultures who consider themselves modern is to overestimate the extent to which their ideas, customs and preferences are in fact “modern” inventions.

“Cynical, pernicious grotesquerie,” wrote Soviet music critic Israel Nestyev in 1946 of Dmitri Shoastakovich’s latest symphony, “[a] tone of relentless mockery and ridicule, emphasis on the ugliness and cruelty of life, the cold irony of stylization.”

Franz Joseph Haydn had bad luck with leaving jobs.

1711 was a good year for priest, composer, teacher and virtuoso violinist Antonio Vivaldi.

Johann Gottlieb Janitsch was one of the lucky class of musicians who secured fairly early in his career a job that provided him with a stable income, a supportive employer, inspiring colleagues, and enough leisure time to pursue his own projects.

Gottfried Finger was born in the Czech Republic, and arrived in London in his mid-twenties ready to make a name for himself as a composer.

To any regular concert-goer in the twenty-first century, it is an obvious fact that the violin is the sovereign of the instruments of the orchestra.

George Frideric Handel has always been a composer’s composer.

Felix Mendelssohn had the most fortunate upbringing that a composer could hope to have.

In 1828, at the age of nine, German pianist Clara Wieck made her debut as a professional musician.

In November 1792, 22-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven left his hometown of Bonn for Vienna, with the arrangement of a scholarship for him by Count Ferdinand von Waldstein.

Jean Sibelius is habitually referred to as Finland’s greatest composer.

At seventeen, British composer Benjamin Britten won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music.

In 1944, Hungarian composer György Ligeti was 21 years old and embarking on a career in music.

On November 6th, 1893, Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere of his Sixth Symphony in St.

Beethoven’s second piano concerto is, in fact his first: he completed it in 1795, two years before the concerto which ended up being assigned as “First” due to a publishing error.

In 1853, the 22-year-old violinist Joseph Joachim was invited by Robert Schumann, then nearing the end of his life, to play the Beethoven violin concerto at the Lower Rhine Music Festival.

Of all of Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifteen symphonies, the towering, gripping Fifth is both the most frequently performed, and one of the musical works about which the most critical, analytical, and explanatory ink has been spilt.

The sum total of composer Claude Debussy’s marine voyages consisted of two crossings of the English Channel.

I didn’t want the house to be sold at all.

Hello.