Allegro Largo Scherzo Finale

Schumann: Piano Concerto in A Minor Shostakovich: Symphony No. 11 “The Year 1905” New Zealand School of Music Orchestra at St. Andrew’s on the Terrace conducted by Ken Young with Diedre Irons, piano There are two other concerts I had planned on writing about before getting to this one – but that was before actually [...]

Well, my hopes/predictions really could not have been further off the mark. The elephant in the room is the absence of any opera (unless you count Simon O’Neill’s Wagner recital). There is a reasonable amount of chamber music on hand – almost all on the weekend of the 6th-7th of March’, but nothing really outside [...]

Part three of a series examining the curious lack of new symphonies. Part Two is here. Culprit #5: Musical Directors Throughout much of the early 20th Century, European audiences knew American composers as specialists in short orchestral works full of charming folk tunes; it was widely believed that there was no such thing as an [...]

(while I struggle to find time for my second real post) Why is it that I detest so much popular music? What is it about “classical” or “contemporary classical” that attracts me? The way they write is thoroughly off-putting, but Marcuse, Attali and Adorno make, between them, an excellent point. Music is not supposed to [...]

De profundis Malaguena Lorelei The Suicide On Watch Madam, look! At the Sante Jail Zaporozhye Cossacks’ Reply to the Sultan of Constantinople O Delvig, Delvig! The Poet’s Death Conclusion More than a little ironically, I’m starting this blog by talking about a a symphony that is probably as far away from a traditional symphony as [...]