In Performance at the White House has been produced since 1978 and the music series spans every administration since President Carter’s. The series began with Horowitz in the East Room and this legendary recital. Since then, In Performance at the White House has embraced virtually every genre of American performance: pop, country, gospel, jazz, blues, theatre and dance among them. […]

Dinu Lipatti gave his final recital, which was recorded, on 16 September 1950 in Besançon, France. Despite severe illness, he gave unmatched performances of Bach’s Partita in B flat major, Mozart’s A minor Sonata, Schubert’s G flat major and E flat major Impromptus, and thirteen of Chopin’s 14 Waltzes. He excluded No. 2, which he was too exhausted to play; […]

“Tranquility through austerity” had become Cage’s watchword by the time he composed the Suite for Toy Piano in 1948. His new musical heroes were the master miniaturists Webern and Satie and in his polemical addresses to the students he championed their sense of scale against the “deadening” monumentality of Beethoven. Cage: “As soon as I began to study oriental philosophy, […]

In July 2011, 19-year-old pianist Benjamin Grosvenor made his debut at the Proms to great acclaim, wowing both audiences and critics with his performance of Liszt‘s Piano Concerto No 2 in A Major. The youngest ever soloist to perform in the First Night of the Proms, he returned to the Royal Albert Hall on August 6 to take on Britten’s […]

At University of California, Berkely, The Townsend Center’s Forum on the Humanities and the Public World presents eminent artists, political leaders, writers, and scholars, each representing a unique discipline, viewpoint, and medium. The series brings the humanities into dialogue with the critical issues at play in the public sphere. The Townsend Center at UC Berkeley has a long and distinguished […]

“Without music life would be a mistake.” – Friedrich Nietzsche Alek­sey Igudes­man and Hyung-ki Joo are two clas­si­cal musi­cians who have taken the world by storm with their unique and hilar­i­ous the­atri­cal shows, which com­bine com­edy with clas­si­cal music and pop­u­lar cul­ture. Their clips on YouTube, to date, have gath­ered over 15 mil­lion hits, and they have appeared live on […]

There is a flood of Soviet-era material coming out of Russia under the current Melodiya label along with other labels. Evidently, one of them will release some of late John Ogdon recitals from Moscow in good sound. Here is a live recital with John Ogdon in Great Hall, Moscow from 1986: Your browser does not support iframes. Program: PLAY > […]

Jorge Bolet was born in Havana, and studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he himself taught from 1939 to 1942. His teachers included Leopold Godowsky, Josef Hofmann, David Saperton, Moriz Rosenthal and Fritz Reiner. Bolet is particularly well remembered for his performances and recordings of large-scale Romantic music, particularly works by Franz Liszt, César Franck and […]

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, was composed in 1805-1806, although no autograph copy survives. The first movement opens with the solo piano, playing simple chords in the tonic key before coming to rest on a dominant chord. After a poetic pause of two and a half beats, the orchestra then enters in B […]

At the World Venice Forum 2009 and the conference on environmental issues and international law, organised by the International Academy of Environmental Sciences, Austrian composer Peter Ablinger presented “Deus Cantando” – a player piano “reading” a child’s recitation of the “Declaration of the International Environmental Criminal Court”, written by Nobel Peace Laureates Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and the Dalai Lama. Ablinger […]

A legend among pianists of the twentieth century, Artur Schnabel (April 17, 1882 – August 15, 1951) was an Austrian pianist, who also composed and taught. Schnabel was known for his intellectual seriousness as a musician, avoiding pure technical bravura. Among the 20th century’s most respected and most important pianists, he displayed a vitality, profundity and spirituality in works by […]

La Linea (“The Line”) is an Italian animated series created by the Italian cartoonist Osvaldo Cavandoli. The series consists of 90 episodes which are about 2–3 minutes long each and were originally broadcast in the Italian channel RAI between 1972 – 1991. Over the years the series aired in more than 40 countries around the world. Due to its short […]