Music for Life: 100 Works to Carry You Through

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Having published books on the 12th-century composer-nun Hildegard of Bingen and the avant-garde composer Harrison Birtwistle, I could see his point. Some performers prefer to sing her chants in groups, or accompanied by a drone, but the solo voice has an unmatched purity.

how playing the violin became part From torment to pleasure: how playing the violin became part

Today we mark two events of 2023: for China’s lunar new year, the choice is the international piano star Yuja Wang, born in Beijing. She was aware that her life would be brief, her time measured,” observed her sister Nadia Boulanger, the great French pedagogue, friend of Stravinsky, teacher of Copland, Bernstein, Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Philip Glass and guru of countless more, who outlived her younger sibling by nearly six decades. Glass, American minimalist extraordinaire, wrote his 20 piano studies “to explore a variety of tempi, textures and piano techniques”, but also to help him become a better keyboard player.

Since most of us now live in towns, Holst’s music offers a welcome fantasy exposure to the wilds from the safety of an urban postcode. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

Fiona Maddocks | Faber Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile by Fiona Maddocks | Faber

I looked forward to scouring the catalogues and burying myself for hours behind my latest trawl of books. In this slow movement from his Cello Sonata, the piano introduces a long, heart-rending melody, before cello and piano interact as equal partners. Would I be able to convince him that the composer, and the music itself, were more interesting than he thought? I had booked, months earlier, to go to Berlin in October 2022 to hear Daniel Barenboim conduct his last Ring cycle.I had an uncle who, intermittently and not necessarily simultaneously, wore a kilt and played the violin.

Music for Life: 100 Classical Works to Carry You Through

was a dramatised monologue about a journey on the metro in which the narrator is attracted to a young man. Maddocks has written four books, [2] the first of which was a survey on the 12th-century composer Hildegard of Bingen in 2001. That quarter of a century has been more or less skimmed over in books on his music, because he composed only a handful of new works in exile.Fiona Maddocks was born in London, studied English literature at Cambridge University and then attended the Royal College of Music. With one joyous explosion after another, each dazzling and bright as a sequence of detonating fireworks, this double-choir motet launches as it means to go on: “Sing to the Lord a new song,” the psalmist demands, and “sing, sing, sing” rings out from different voices in effervescent, uplifting harmony and darting, virtuosic counterpoint. To help narrow the field, I laid down a few guidelines: no operas, as they have their own narrative already (though one or two overtures have crept in).