Settling Scores

Review: Pauline Viardot – Songs

This delightful album brings together original songs and arrangements by the unjustly neglected Spanish composer Pauline Viardot (1840 – 1910). For those unfamiliar with her music, this album is the perfect introduction with winning performances by the Bulgarian soprano Ina Kancheva, ably accompanied on the piano by Ludmil Angelov.

The Wit and Wisdom of Sir Thomas Beecham

It was the sort of gaffe that only Sir Thomas Beecham could get away with. As part of a tour of Germany in 1936 with his newly-formed London Philharmonic Orchestra, he gave a live broadcast concert in Berlin. Noticing Adolf Hitler in the audience applauding after the first piece, he turned to the orchestra and,…

Half-monk, half-rascal

Writing to a friend in 1942, Poulenc admitted “I am well aware that I am not the kind of musician who makes harmonic inventions, like Igor [Stravinsky], Ravel or Debussy, but I think there is a place for new music which is content with using other people’s chords. Was that not the case with Mozart…

Brahms Goes to Academia

Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897) once wrote “I am only too often reminded that I am a difficult person to get along with. I am growing accustomed to bearing the consequences of this”. Famously bad-tempered, tactless and cynical, he is once said to have left a party saying “if there is anyone in here I…

Into the Sunset: the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss

On the morning of 30 April 1945, the same day that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in an underground bunker in Berlin, Major John Kramers of the US Army 103rd Infantry Division and his men called on the shuttered villa at Zöppritzstrasse 42 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps with a view to headquarter his men…

An Alpine Symphony

Shortly before the premiere in 1915 of his tone poem Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony), Richard Strauss (1869 – 1949) quipped “Now at last I have learned to orchestrate!”

Judgement Day

The great jazz composer, bandleader and notorious procrastinator, Duke Ellington once said “I don’t need time, I need a deadline”.

Death in Venice

In the third volume of his memoirs, An Orderly Man (1983), the actor Dirk Bogarde tells the story of the first screening for Warner Bros. studio executives of the film Death in Venice, directed by Luchino Visconti. Naturally they were curious to see how their money had been spent.

Lisztomania – a film review

This year sees the fortieth anniversary of the film Lisztomania, an outrageous fantasy biopic on the life of Franz Liszt, written and directed by the unashamed bad boy of British cinema, Ken Russell (1927-2011).

Transfigured Night

During his years of permanent exile in America, Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951) once remarked “There is nothing I long for more intensely than to be taken for a better sort of Tchaikovsky. People should know my tunes and whistle them”.