Welcome to ClassicalConnect - the free classical music site!
ClassicalConnect is your virtual concert hall. It offers independent classical musicians the opportunity to be heard around the world while providing music lovers with a large selection of music performed by some of the most interesting musicians around. More...
If you are a musician, we urge you to sign up and upload your performances. Our site is a great way to share your music with the rest of the world! (For technical details, please click here)
If you are a casual music lover, you can listen to our playlists or browse through the music, selecting your favorite instruments. We have a great library of complete performances, from fleeting mazurkas to long sonatas and concertos. The library grows continuously with uploads from all over the world. Some of the compositions have been recorded by different performers, which we think creates a wonderful opportunity for comparing the music's different interpretations: our site has a unique feature created specifically for this purpose.
Once you have set up your account, you'll be able to select the type of music that plays when you enter the site. If you prefer a specific musical instrument, you could either select the most popular performances, or allow the system to pick the selection for that particular instrument. We call these lists "Top" and
"Serendipity." Piano music lovers, for example, could either make the "Top Piano" or "Piano: Serendipity" playlists as their starting point. Even if you don't have a preferred instrument, you could still select the option of playing the most popular performances among all the musical categories. Or, you could simply have the system make the choice for you.
After logging in, feel free to comment on any performance (just remember that artists can be very sensitive!). And of course, your vote counts on ClassicalConnect, so rate any piece using our 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) scale. May we recommend that you reserve 10s for truly great performances and 1s only for the really awful ones?
As the ClassicalConnect community grows, you will be able to connect to fellow music lovers and musicians. You could send messages to your friends or join discussions. It's very easy to share an interesting performance with other users: simply click the Share button on the player and select the ID of your friend. You could even send a performance to friends who never visited the site: just copy the URL of a particular Performance Details page into an e-mail and send it (Performance Details is the page that appears when you click on the Details button in the Player or on the title of the piece when you search or brows the library). When your correspondent receive the e-mail, he or she will click on the Play button, the Player will appear and start that particular performance. Try it!
In the near future, we plan to add several interesting features that we hope will only enhance your experience. We will keep you informed about all new developments.
We appreciate all your ideas and comments, so please let us know what you think: just use the Site Functionality and Issues forum, or send us a message.
Enjoy!
ClassicalConnect
Less...
At the moment, our site only accepts MP3 files, so if you have a CD recording, you can rip and upload it in this format. For higher quality, we recommend using a bit rate of 128 kbps, audio sample rate of 44 kHz, and a two-channel (stereo) format.
To upload, enter the complete title of the piece, including its key, number, opus, etc. For example, the title of Beethoven's Sonata No. 21 would be identified as Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53. "Waldstein" is optional - especially considering that in some countries, it is known as "L'Aurora." You can also leave comments about your own performance.
Please do not upload parts of a composition. Think of ClassicalConnect as your virtual concert hall: upload only the things you would play in a real one.
If you have any questions, please contact us by clicking here and sending us an e-mail. We'll make every effort to respond as quickly as possible.
Less...
From our Historical Interviews:
Bruce Duffie talks with the composer Aaron Jay Kernis
Bruce Duffie: Has winning those prizes put an undue expectation, either on your part or on our part, for each successive piece? Aaron Jay Kernis: ... The problem with the Pulitzer Prize was that initially, it gave me this sense of worry, of, “Oh, had I just written my best piece, and could I not do anything more? Was that it?” And it gave a kind of too much of an expectation, as you said, for the next piece. I had to let go of that, of course, or otherwise I would just worry about that incessantly... BD: ... Are you pleased with the recordings that are out?.. AJK: Very pleased! I’m very pleased with the recordings that have come out, and I’m only sorry that there aren’t more. There are quite a few, but with the kind of near-collapse of the recording industry, the first thing to go were any of the major recording labels recording new music, and particularly American new music. At least in Europe they could afford to pay those ensembles, but here it’s been harder. I was very fortunate; I had a very wonderful situation with Argo label, which, you know, did wonderful things for five or seven years, and then has stopped. AJK: ...The most pleasurable part for me is when a piece is done and I really feel at home with it, and know that it’s really finished and that I’ve done my best and I can go on. There are only a handful of pieces that I just feel pleasure hearing, and have a sense that I accomplished what I had set out to do.
From our Historical Interviews:
Bruce Duffie talks with the composer Lowell Liebermann
Bruce Duffie: Do you feel, though, that it's a collaborative art between you and the performer?
Lowell Liebermann: No.
BD: You don’t want the performer to put anything into it?
LL: No. They should bring something to it, but it’s not like the performer is taking your piece and then layering over their own ideas on it. Not at all, because they might as well just rewrite the notes while they’re at it. To a composer, almost the whole dynamic framework comes before the notes. It’s almost like the notes are what are being filled in when you compose, not the dynamics and the articulations. A lot of performers do think that the notes are sacred, but beyond that they can sort of do anything they like to a piece. I think the act of performing and interpreting a piece is trying to come as close as one can to what was in the composer’s imagination. Now, more often than not, that’s not entirely clear, and you have to interpret and figure out what did the composer mean in a lot of respects. But no, I don’t feel it as sort of a collaborative thing where the performer is an equal.... To me, it’s the bad performers that impose their own personality onto the music and end up with something that is not what the composer intended, necessarily.
Excerpts from the pianist Jorge Federico Osorio's Interview with Bruce Duffie
BD: How far back do you go in music? Do you play some Bach and Scarlatti? JFO: Yes, Bach, of course. Scarlatti, yes. It’s from then on, really, that I play. BD: All on the modern piano? JFO: On the modern piano, yes. I enjoy his music tremendously on the modern piano! BD: Do you have any feelings about people who insist on doing it only on the old instruments? JFO: It’s interesting, but I’m not that convinced by it. I think it sounds so expressive on the piano. That’s just the way I feel. I don’t think I would go and get myself an instrument just to see. We really don’t know, really, what was in their minds. At that time, those were the instruments that were available, but it’s not to say that they were stuck with that! I think the music is much greater than that. It transcends all that, so it’s fine with me to play Bach on the piano.... Like Beethoven, also. In his last sonatas you really get a feeling that he was searching for something new, something he was really trying to get out of there. And when you hear these on instruments that were there when he was alive, I don’t think it has the same impact. I’m not all that for it.
Excerpts from the composer Easley Blackwood's Interview with Bruce Duffie
Easley Blackwood: There was a great deal of exploration done in this [atonal polyrhythmic] idiom, not in one exactly like the one that I was using, but in what you'd call atonal polyrythmic texture which starts out shortly after the close of World War II and comes to a big peak with the Darmstadt school, and then gradually begins to fall into a decline somewhere in the middle of the 1960s. By the 70s, it's been, to a large extent, abandoned except by some die-hards, and you find that it was replaced by aleatoric music. Then a little bit later, minimalists come into it. At the same time, when other people were losing interest in it, I was engaged in a big research project about chord progressions within equal tunings where the number of notes is different from 12. What I was particularly interested in was chord progressions that would give a sensation either of modal coherence or else of tonality. That is to say you can actually identify subdominants, dominants, tonics, and keys. In the process of doing that, plus having taught traditional harmony since I came to the University of Chicago in 1958 and writing the microtonal etudes to illustrate these chord progressions, I got, for the first time, firsthand sensation of what it was to write music in tonal idioms. I must say I found that it was rather more amusing than writing in the atonal polyrhythmic idiom that I'd been using.
BD: So is this the purpose of music? To provide amusement for the composer?
EB: Well, I think it is to provide high class entertainment for somebody. That's at least one purpose of it. There are others. I know it's very fashionable these days to indulge in political or social commentary, but if I look at the history of music, I see a vast repertoire where that's not the case at all.
Excerpts from the violinist Jennifer Koh's Interview with Bruce Duffie
Jennifer Koh: ...One of the most amazing concerts that I did was a couple days after September 11th, 2001. The National Symphony in Washington D.C. decided to still present a concert. I think it was on a Friday, and September 11th was on a Tuesday. I went there, and part of the reason that I felt that I could do this was because it was an all-Beethoven concert ... It was the kind of music that I felt was, in a way, the most appropriate for this time. So we had rehearsals and it was still very chaotic at that time.... They'd see a paper bag and they'd think it's a bomb, so the Kennedy Center would lock down, rehearsal would stop and everybody would vacate the building. So it wasn't the most ideal rehearsal situation. When the concert came, it was amazing. It was completely sold out, and after I finished playing, people were just weeping! Music is about communicating when you can’t find the words. It’s about spirituality, in a sense. It’s about the human soul. It’s about ... being able to take all the sides of humanity and turn it into something amazingly beautiful and profound...
Excerpts from George Flynn’s interview with Bruce Duffie
BD: Are all of your pieces on commission, or are there things that just have to come out of you? GF: It’s both… If there is no particular commission at any given time and I’m full of ideas, I’ll start working on
something. ... I have pieces mentally stacked up for a long time ahead. Sometimes I can’t wait to get done with commissioned pieces to get
on with other ideas that I find are exciting and interesting that occurred to me, but nobody’s asked me to write that particular piece and I want to do it
anyway. BD: When you’re working on a piece and you go over it to get it right, how do you know when it’s done? GF: I generally will have a pretty good idea long before I’ve actually made my first complete sketch — or
draft — what’s going to happen in that piece. That is, I know the overall shape of it. Frequently the piece will come as a single,
large shape… Sometimes some major thing happens. Certainly one of the most interesting experiences that I had was with a piece called
American Rest. Its first version was something like twenty-two to
twenty-four minutes, and I didn’t like it. It didn’t do what I wanted it to do, for some reason, so I revised it and developed it in various
ways, and it turned out to be sixty-five minutes.
Excerpts from Elliott Carter’s Interview with Bruce Duffie
Bruce Duffie: Should an audience understand your music, even on its first hearing? Elliott Carter: Well, I think many people do understand it on its first hearing, surely. One of the basic problems,
though, with first hearing is that the first performance is seldom faithful to the music… I mean to tell you, it takes a long time
for performers to learn, or to find out what’s in the music. ... The first performance very seldom presents the music as it will be worked out.
I’ve always felt, at least up until fairly recently, that it took about ten years for the performers to understand what the music was about. It
was very obvious in the case of older music. Very few people understood what Beethoven was about in his time, and certainly the last quartets
took almost a hundred years to be understood.
… EC: I think orchestra music is tiresome to write. It’s too much orchestra. It takes too many notes. It’s too large a problem, and
then you don’t get good rehearsals. You don’t get enough rehearsals, except occasionally, and you get a public that is not terribly interested in contemporary music.
December 7, 2009. From recent uploads. This week we feature three performances that were recently added to our library. First we'll hear Maurice Ravel's Tzigane. It is performed by the violinist Dmitri Berlinsky, who is accompanied by the pianist Elena Baksht. Then the flutist Kristin Paxinos plays Sonatine by the French composer Pierre Sancan. Sancan died just a year ago but the style of this piece, written in 1946, harkens back to Ravel's time. And lastly, Irina Kotlyar - Gregory Shifrin Piano Duo plays Schubert's masterpiece, his Fantasia in F Minor, D. 940. To listen, click here.
November 30, 2009. Four Ballades. In the music world, the word Ballade usually brings either Chopin or Brahms to mind. Both of them wrote magnificent pieces for piano under that title (we'll hear two of them), but of course many other composers wrote ballades as well. We'll hear one of Eugène Ysaÿe's Sonatas for solo violin, which he called "Ballade," and also a piece by the Swiss composer Frank Martin by the same name, this one written for flute. So, first we'll hear Hayk Arsenyan playing Choipin's Ballade No. 2 in F Major, then the young French violinist Fanny Clamagirand in the Ysaÿe. The fultist Katherine DeJongh will follow with the Frank (she's accompanied by Yoko Yamada-Selvaggio). We'll finish with Sevgi Giles playing Brahms' Ballade No. 2 in D Major, Op.10. To listen, click here.
November 23, 2009. Thanksgiving. This week, we celebrate this most American of holidays with a selection of American compositions. We'll begin with the Fugue from Samuel Barber's Sonata Op. 26 (1949). It's played by Tania Stavreva. We'll then go back in time about 50 years to listen to Amy Beach's Romance for Violin and Piano. It's performed by Rachel Barton Pine, with Matthew Hagle on the piano. Next comes Aaron Copland and his wistful Duo for Flute and Piano, played by the flutist Martha Councell and Richard Steinbach. William Bolcom's Graceful Ghost Rag (Christina Castelli violin, Grant Moffett piano) will follow. We conclude with Elliott Carter, whose career spanned almost 80 years and coincided with some of the most creative periods of American classical music. His Caténaires is superbly played by Ursula Oppens. To listen, click here.
November 16, 2009. Classical Sonatas. These three sonatas were composed in the span of a quarter century. Haydn’s Sonata in E Major is the oldest; it was composed in 1776 while Haydn was comfortably employed by Nikolaus Esterházy. Mozart’s Sonata in D Major (No.18) comes from 1789; as it turned out, it was the last piano sonata he ever composed. We conclude with Beethoven’s sonata No. 13 (Quasi una fantasia). It was composed in 1800, in the middle of a very active period, when Beethoven started experimenting with other musical forms and composing quartets and symphonies for the first time.
The Haydn is played by Chu-Fang Huang, a young Chinese pianist. She studied at the Curtis and the Juillard, and is the First Prize winner of the 2005 Cleveland International Piano Competition. Michael Tsalka plays the Mozart. He was born in Israel and graduated from the Rubin Academy of Music. A prolific recitalist, he also co-founded the Marzec-Tsalka Piano Duo. The Beethoven is performed by Mauro Bertoli, who graduated from the Giuseppe Verdi Academy of Music in Milan. He maintains an active career, performing recitals and playing with orchestras in Italy and other countries. To listen to the sonatas, please click here.
November 9, 2009. As Eric Henderson writes himself, when he was 13, his teacher took him to attend a concert by the great Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia. His teacher also arranged a private meeting with Eric and the maestro. Upon hearing him play, Segovia invited Eric to come study with him in Spain. Eric became only the third person ever invited to study privately with Segovia. We'll hear Eric Henderson playing several pieces, including one of his own compositions. We'll start with the Bach-influenced Etude No. 1 by Heitor Villa-Lobos. Then we'll hear another small etude, by Fernando Sor (No. 9). Then comes Henderson's own Prelude No. 3 ("Homage"). We finish with Moreno Torroba's wonderful Sonatina. To listen, click here.
November 2, 2009. Recent uploads. Peter Schickele is best known as the creative force behind P.D.Q. Bach, "the oddest of the twenty odd children" of J.S. Bach. Schickele is also recognized as a serious composer in his own right. The Orion Ensemble recently uploaded a performance of Schickele’s Serenade for Three. Note that the third movement contains variations on a theme by P.D.Q. Bach's Oedipus Tex, "opera/oratorio in one cathartic act."
We continue with a much darker piece, Augusta Read Thomas' Angel Musings. It was commissioned by the Orion Ensemble in 1998. This composition consists of two movements, "Nightfall" and "Daybreak." To listen, please click here.
October 26, 2009. This week we’re celebrating the birthday of the great Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti, who was born on October 26, 1685. 1685 was a good year: Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handle were also born that year. Scarlatti wrote 555 sonatas, only a small part of which were published during his lifetime. Vladimir Horowitz and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli were wonderful (and very different) interpreters. Most of Scarlatti’s sonatas were written for harpsichord. We’ll hear four of them played on the modern piano (by the Italian pianist Mauro Bertoli, the American pianist and composer Heather Schmidt, the young Chinese pianist Jie Chen, and Mauro Bertoli again), and then on fortepiano by David Schrader. To listen, please click here.
We would be amiss not to mention Niccolò Paganini, who was also born this week in 1782. Listen here as Albert Markov plays Moses, Variations on One String. Exquisite.
October 19, 2009. Choral works. This week we present a rather unusual selection of choral works. We start with an excerpt from Rachmaninov’s The Vespers: Bogoroditse Devo (Ave Maria), sung by the National Collegiate Chorale of Scotland. We continue our Russian theme with Ya Raduyus, the setting of Psalm 114 by our contemporary and Oregon native, Tim Pack. We’ll finish with the three pieces from Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols: Procession, Bulalalow, and Recession. They are sung by the delightful Brighton School Chamber Choir from Adelaide, Australia under the direction of Michael Griffin. The soprano in Balulalow is Heather Muggridge. To listen, click here.
October 12, 2009. Three Trios. We haven’t featured a trio in a long time, so we decided to present three of them. The Flatiron Trio named themselves after the architectural landmark of their neighborhood in New York City. It’s a truly international ensemble: an Israeli (Nurit Pacht, violin), a Canadian (Jeremy Findlay, cello) and a Russian (Elena Braslavsky, piano), happily making music in New York. We’ll hear them perform Shostakovich’s Trio No. 1, written when the composer was just 17.
The Brooklyn-based Janus Trio is quite unusual: it brings together a flute (Amanda Baker), viola (Beth Meyers) and a harp (Nuiko Wadden). They like to perform modern music, so Debussy (whose Sonata for flute, viola and harp we’ll hear) is almost as far back as they’ll go.
The Lincoln Trio (Desirée Ruhstrat, violin, David Cunliffe, cello and Marta Aznavoorian, piano) is one of Chicago’s most celebrated chamber ensembles. We’ll hear them play Astor Piazzolla’s Otoño Porteño (Autumn), from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. To listen, click here.
October 5, 2009. Camille Saint-Saëns, who was born on October 9, 1935, wrote a lot of rather forgettable music. But he will be remembered for his masterpieces, such as The Carnival of the Animals, the Organ Symphony, and, of course, the Introduction and Rondo Cappricioso.
That’s how we’ll begin our playlist, which we created to celebrate the birthday of this wonderful French composer and organist: the Introduction and Rondo Cappricioso is played by Lindsay Deutsch and accompanied by Kuang-Hao Huang.
The Havanaise, arranged for flute and played by Kristin Paxinos (with Shelley Trissel at the piano), follows.
The famous Swan is then heard in a very unusual arrangement for the saxophone; it’s beautifully played by Otis Murphy.
We conclude with the Piano Concerto No. 2, performed by the pianist James Dick with the Texas Festival Orchestra (Pascal Verrot, conductor). To listen, click here.
September 28, 2009. It so happened that we haven’t featured the voice in quite some time. We’d like to make up for this by presenting the soprano Tina Beverly.
Ms. Beverly has an agile voice and superb musicality. In this selection, she sings arias from Bach’s Cantata No. 205 and Mozart’s opera Il re pastore.
She then brings us two songs by Edvard Grieg: Solveig’s song and With a water-lily. Debussy’s Claire de lune, from Quatre chansons de jeunesse, follows.
The last piece in this selection is Glitter and be Gay, from Leonard Bernstien’s opera Candid.
William Billingham is the pianist; the violin part in the Bach and the Mozart is performed by Alison Zlotow.
To listen, click here.
September 21, 2009. This week 103 years ago Dmitry Shostakovich, a great composer and a tragic figure in the world of classical music, was born. We’ll mark this event with the following selection.
First, we’ll hear the Piano Quintet in g minor, opus 57 played by the pianist James Dick and the Eusia String Quartet.
To change the mood, we’ll follow with The Pursuit, from the film score to the 1941 movie, The Adventures of Korzinkina (Shostakovich wrote many film scores in his life, both to earn money and to prove that he can write “music for the masses”). This little piece is performed by DUO, a collaboration of the pianists Stephanie Ho and Saar Ahuvia.
We’ll conclude with the Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 99 in an old (1969) but wonderful performance by Albert Markov and the Moscow State Orchestra under the baton of Yuri Aranovich. To listen, please click here.
September 14, 2009. Monica Lee started playing the piano at the age of four. She went on to study at the Interlochen Arts Academy, the Saint Louis Conservatory of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. She has performed as soloist and chamber musician in Japan, Russia, Canada, and throughout the United States. Monica currently resides in San Francisco, where she maintains a full studio.
We present what could’ve been a delightful recital: Mozart’s Piano Sonata No.9 in D Major, Sonetto 104 del Petrarca by Liszt, two Preludes by Sergei Rachmaninov (Op.23, No.6 and Op.32, No.10), and Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 6. To listen, click here.
September 7, 2009. This week we celebrate the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, who was born in a small town near Prague on September 8, 1841. We start with Humoresque, played here in a transcription for viola and guitar with Brett Deubner, the violist. Next is the Piano Quintet played by Quintessence. Then Jonita Lattimore sings the American-inspired Lord, A New Song I would Fashion. She’s accompanied by Eric Weimer. We conclude with the String Quartet in E-flat Major, performed by the Pacifica Quartet and Michael Tree. To listen to the playlist, click here. And please don’t forget to sign in to listen to the complete performances.
August 31, 2009. New features. We’d like to let you know about improvements we recently made to the site. First of all, the Compare function. In the past, you didn’t immediately know if there was another recording that could be compared to the one being played. Now you can see this right away: if the Compare button is grayed-out, there are no other recordings, if it’s orange-yellow, there is it least one more. Read about it here.
In conjunction with Compare, we have also created a list of Multiple Performances. More details could be found here.
We have further created a list of all Composers. Read about it here.
And lastly, you can now share the music with everybody; just click the Share button on the player! We write more about it here.
Welcome to ClassicalConnect - the free classical music site!
ClassicalConnect is your virtual concert hall. It offers independent classical musicians the opportunity to be heard around the world while providing music lovers with a large selection of music performed by some of the most interesting musicians around. More...
If you are a musician, we urge you to sign up and upload your performances. Our site is a great way to share your music with the rest of the world! (For technical details, please click here)
If you are a casual music lover, you can listen to our playlists or browse through the music, selecting your favorite instruments. We have a great library of complete performances, from fleeting mazurkas to long sonatas and concertos. The library grows continuously with uploads from all over the world. Some of the compositions have been recorded by different performers, which we think creates a wonderful opportunity for comparing the music's different interpretations: our site has a unique feature created specifically for this purpose.
Once you have set up your account, you'll be able to select the type of music that plays when you enter the site. If you prefer a specific musical instrument, you could either select the most popular performances, or allow the system to pick the selection for that particular instrument. We call these lists "Top" and "Serendipity." Piano music lovers, for example, could either make the "Top Piano" or "Piano: Serendipity" playlists as their starting point. Even if you don't have a preferred instrument, you could still select the option of playing the most popular performances among all the musical categories. Or, you could simply have the system make the choice for you.
After logging in, feel free to comment on any performance (just remember that artists can be very sensitive!). And of course, your vote counts on ClassicalConnect, so rate any piece using our 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) scale. May we recommend that you reserve 10s for truly great performances and 1s only for the really awful ones?
As the ClassicalConnect community grows, you will be able to connect to fellow music lovers and musicians. You could send messages to your friends or join discussions. It's very easy to share an interesting performance with other users: simply click the Share button on the player and select the ID of your friend. You could even send a performance to friends who never visited the site: just copy the URL of a particular Performance Details page into an e-mail and send it (Performance Details is the page that appears when you click on the Details button in the Player or on the title of the piece when you search or brows the library). When your correspondent receive the e-mail, he or she will click on the Play button, the Player will appear and start that particular performance. Try it!
In the near future, we plan to add several interesting features that we hope will only enhance your experience. We will keep you informed about all new developments.
We appreciate all your ideas and comments, so please let us know what you think: just use the Site Functionality and Issues forum, or send us a message.
Enjoy!
ClassicalConnect
Less...At the moment, our site only accepts MP3 files, so if you have a CD recording, you can rip and upload it in this format. For higher quality, we recommend using a bit rate of 128 kbps, audio sample rate of 44 kHz, and a two-channel (stereo) format.
To upload, enter the complete title of the piece, including its key, number, opus, etc. For example, the title of Beethoven's Sonata No. 21 would be identified as Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53. "Waldstein" is optional - especially considering that in some countries, it is known as "L'Aurora." You can also leave comments about your own performance.
Please do not upload parts of a composition. Think of ClassicalConnect as your virtual concert hall: upload only the things you would play in a real one.
If you have any questions, please contact us by clicking here and sending us an e-mail. We'll make every effort to respond as quickly as possible.
Less...From our Historical Interviews:
Bruce Duffie talks with the composer Aaron Jay Kernis
Bruce Duffie: Has winning those prizes put an undue expectation, either on your part or on our part, for each successive piece?
Read more: 1 2 3 4Aaron Jay Kernis: ... The problem with the Pulitzer Prize was that initially, it gave me this sense of worry, of, “Oh, had I just written my best piece, and could I not do anything more? Was that it?” And it gave a kind of too much of an expectation, as you said, for the next piece. I had to let go of that, of course, or otherwise I would just worry about that incessantly...
BD: ... Are you pleased with the recordings that are out?..
AJK: Very pleased! I’m very pleased with the recordings that have come out, and I’m only sorry that there aren’t more. There are quite a few, but with the kind of near-collapse of the recording industry, the first thing to go were any of the major recording labels recording new music, and particularly American new music. At least in Europe they could afford to pay those ensembles, but here it’s been harder. I was very fortunate; I had a very wonderful situation with Argo label, which, you know, did wonderful things for five or seven years, and then has stopped.
AJK: ...The most pleasurable part for me is when a piece is done and I really feel at home with it, and know that it’s really finished and that I’ve done my best and I can go on. There are only a handful of pieces that I just feel pleasure hearing, and have a sense that I accomplished what I had set out to do.
From our Historical Interviews:
Bruce Duffie talks with the composer Lowell Liebermann
Bruce Duffie: Do you feel, though, that it's a collaborative art between you and the performer?
Lowell Liebermann: No.
BD: You don’t want the performer to put anything into it?
LL: No. They should bring something to it, but it’s not like the performer is taking your piece and then layering over their own ideas on it. Not at all, because they might as well just rewrite the notes while they’re at it. To a composer, almost the whole dynamic framework comes before the notes. It’s almost like the notes are what are being filled in when you compose, not the dynamics and the articulations. A lot of performers do think that the notes are sacred, but beyond that they can sort of do anything they like to a piece. I think the act of performing and interpreting a piece is trying to come as close as one can to what was in the composer’s imagination. Now, more often than not, that’s not entirely clear, and you have to interpret and figure out what did the composer mean in a lot of respects. But no, I don’t feel it as sort of a collaborative thing where the performer is an equal.... To me, it’s the bad performers that impose their own personality onto the music and end up with something that is not what the composer intended, necessarily.
Read more: 1 2 3 4Excerpts from the pianist Jorge Federico Osorio's Interview with Bruce Duffie
BD: How far back do you go in music? Do you play some Bach and Scarlatti?
Read more: 1 2 3 4JFO: Yes, Bach, of course. Scarlatti, yes. It’s from then on, really, that I play.
BD: All on the modern piano?
JFO: On the modern piano, yes. I enjoy his music tremendously on the modern piano!
BD: Do you have any feelings about people who insist on doing it only on the old instruments?
JFO: It’s interesting, but I’m not that convinced by it. I think it sounds so expressive on the piano. That’s just the way I feel. I don’t think I would go and get myself an instrument just to see. We really don’t know, really, what was in their minds. At that time, those were the instruments that were available, but it’s not to say that they were stuck with that! I think the music is much greater than that. It transcends all that, so it’s fine with me to play Bach on the piano.... Like Beethoven, also. In his last sonatas you really get a feeling that he was searching for something new, something he was really trying to get out of there. And when you hear these on instruments that were there when he was alive, I don’t think it has the same impact. I’m not all that for it.
Excerpts from the composer Easley Blackwood's Interview with Bruce Duffie
Easley Blackwood: There was a great deal of exploration done in this [atonal polyrhythmic] idiom, not in one exactly like the one that I was using, but in what you'd call atonal polyrythmic texture which starts out shortly after the close of World War II and comes to a big peak with the Darmstadt school, and then gradually begins to fall into a decline somewhere in the middle of the 1960s. By the 70s, it's been, to a large extent, abandoned except by some die-hards, and you find that it was replaced by aleatoric music. Then a little bit later, minimalists come into it. At the same time, when other people were losing interest in it, I was engaged in a big research project about chord progressions within equal tunings where the number of notes is different from 12. What I was particularly interested in was chord progressions that would give a sensation either of modal coherence or else of tonality. That is to say you can actually identify subdominants, dominants, tonics, and keys. In the process of doing that, plus having taught traditional harmony since I came to the University of Chicago in 1958 and writing the microtonal etudes to illustrate these chord progressions, I got, for the first time, firsthand sensation of what it was to write music in tonal idioms. I must say I found that it was rather more amusing than writing in the atonal polyrhythmic idiom that I'd been using.
BD: So is this the purpose of music? To provide amusement for the composer?
EB: Well, I think it is to provide high class entertainment for somebody. That's at least one purpose of it. There are others. I know it's very fashionable these days to indulge in political or social commentary, but if I look at the history of music, I see a vast repertoire where that's not the case at all.
Read more: 1 2 3 4Excerpts from the violinist Jennifer Koh's Interview with Bruce Duffie
Jennifer Koh: ...One of the most amazing concerts that I did was a couple days after September 11th, 2001. The National Symphony in Washington D.C. decided to still present a concert. I think it was on a Friday, and September 11th was on a Tuesday. I went there, and part of the reason that I felt that I could do this was because it was an all-Beethoven concert ... It was the kind of music that I felt was, in a way, the most appropriate for this time. So we had rehearsals and it was still very chaotic at that time.... They'd see a paper bag and they'd think it's a bomb, so the Kennedy Center would lock down, rehearsal would stop and everybody would vacate the building. So it wasn't the most ideal rehearsal situation. When the concert came, it was amazing. It was completely sold out, and after I finished playing, people were just weeping! Music is about communicating when you can’t find the words. It’s about spirituality, in a sense. It’s about the human soul. It’s about ... being able to take all the sides of humanity and turn it into something amazingly beautiful and profound...
Read more: 1 2 3 4Excerpts from George Flynn’s interview with Bruce Duffie
BD: Are all of your pieces on commission, or are there things that just have to come out of you?
Read more: 1 2 3 4GF: It’s both… If there is no particular commission at any given time and I’m full of ideas, I’ll start working on something. ... I have pieces mentally stacked up for a long time ahead. Sometimes I can’t wait to get done with commissioned pieces to get on with other ideas that I find are exciting and interesting that occurred to me, but nobody’s asked me to write that particular piece and I want to do it anyway.
BD: When you’re working on a piece and you go over it to get it right, how do you know when it’s done?
GF: I generally will have a pretty good idea long before I’ve actually made my first complete sketch — or draft — what’s going to happen in that piece. That is, I know the overall shape of it. Frequently the piece will come as a single, large shape… Sometimes some major thing happens. Certainly one of the most interesting experiences that I had was with a piece called American Rest. Its first version was something like twenty-two to twenty-four minutes, and I didn’t like it. It didn’t do what I wanted it to do, for some reason, so I revised it and developed it in various ways, and it turned out to be sixty-five minutes.
Excerpts from Elliott Carter’s Interview with Bruce Duffie
Bruce Duffie: Should an audience understand your music, even on its first hearing?
Read more: 1 2 3 4Elliott Carter: Well, I think many people do understand it on its first hearing, surely. One of the basic problems, though, with first hearing is that the first performance is seldom faithful to the music… I mean to tell you, it takes a long time for performers to learn, or to find out what’s in the music. ... The first performance very seldom presents the music as it will be worked out. I’ve always felt, at least up until fairly recently, that it took about ten years for the performers to understand what the music was about. It was very obvious in the case of older music. Very few people understood what Beethoven was about in his time, and certainly the last quartets took almost a hundred years to be understood.
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EC: I think orchestra music is tiresome to write. It’s too much orchestra. It takes too many notes. It’s too large a problem, and then you don’t get good rehearsals. You don’t get enough rehearsals, except occasionally, and you get a public that is not terribly interested in contemporary music.
December 7, 2009. From recent uploads. This week we feature three performances that were recently added to our library. First we'll hear Maurice Ravel's Tzigane. It is performed by the violinist Dmitri Berlinsky, who is accompanied by the pianist Elena Baksht. Then the flutist Kristin Paxinos plays Sonatine by the French composer Pierre Sancan. Sancan died just a year ago but the style of this piece, written in 1946, harkens back to Ravel's time. And lastly, Irina Kotlyar - Gregory Shifrin Piano Duo plays Schubert's masterpiece, his Fantasia in F Minor, D. 940. To listen, click here.
November 30, 2009. Four Ballades. In the music world, the word Ballade usually brings either Chopin or Brahms to mind. Both of them wrote magnificent pieces for piano under that title (we'll hear two of them), but of course many other composers wrote ballades as well. We'll hear one of Eugène Ysaÿe's Sonatas for solo violin, which he called "Ballade," and also a piece by the Swiss composer Frank Martin by the same name, this one written for flute. So, first we'll hear Hayk Arsenyan playing Choipin's Ballade No. 2 in F Major, then the young French violinist Fanny Clamagirand in the Ysaÿe. The fultist Katherine DeJongh will follow with the Frank (she's accompanied by Yoko Yamada-Selvaggio). We'll finish with Sevgi Giles playing Brahms' Ballade No. 2 in D Major, Op.10. To listen, click here.
November 23, 2009. Thanksgiving. This week, we celebrate this most American of holidays with a selection of American compositions. We'll begin with the Fugue from Samuel Barber's Sonata Op. 26 (1949). It's played by Tania Stavreva. We'll then go back in time about 50 years to listen to Amy Beach's Romance for Violin and Piano. It's performed by Rachel Barton Pine, with Matthew Hagle on the piano. Next comes Aaron Copland and his wistful Duo for Flute and Piano, played by the flutist Martha Councell and Richard Steinbach. William Bolcom's Graceful Ghost Rag (Christina Castelli violin, Grant Moffett piano) will follow. We conclude with Elliott Carter, whose career spanned almost 80 years and coincided with some of the most creative periods of American classical music. His Caténaires is superbly played by Ursula Oppens. To listen, click here.
November 16, 2009. Classical Sonatas. These three sonatas were composed in the span of a quarter century. Haydn’s Sonata in E Major is the oldest; it was composed in 1776 while Haydn was comfortably employed by Nikolaus Esterházy. Mozart’s Sonata in D Major (No.18) comes from 1789; as it turned out, it was the last piano sonata he ever composed. We conclude with Beethoven’s sonata No. 13 (Quasi una fantasia). It was composed in 1800, in the middle of a very active period, when Beethoven started experimenting with other musical forms and composing quartets and symphonies for the first time.
The Haydn is played by Chu-Fang Huang, a young Chinese pianist. She studied at the Curtis and the Juillard, and is the First Prize winner of the 2005 Cleveland International Piano Competition. Michael Tsalka plays the Mozart. He was born in Israel and graduated from the Rubin Academy of Music. A prolific recitalist, he also co-founded the Marzec-Tsalka Piano Duo. The Beethoven is performed by Mauro Bertoli, who graduated from the Giuseppe Verdi Academy of Music in Milan. He maintains an active career, performing recitals and playing with orchestras in Italy and other countries. To listen to the sonatas, please click here.
November 9, 2009. As Eric Henderson writes himself, when he was 13, his teacher took him to attend a concert by the great Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia. His teacher also arranged a private meeting with Eric and the maestro. Upon hearing him play, Segovia invited Eric to come study with him in Spain. Eric became only the third person ever invited to study privately with Segovia. We'll hear Eric Henderson playing several pieces, including one of his own compositions. We'll start with the Bach-influenced Etude No. 1 by Heitor Villa-Lobos. Then we'll hear another small etude, by Fernando Sor (No. 9). Then comes Henderson's own Prelude No. 3 ("Homage"). We finish with Moreno Torroba's wonderful Sonatina. To listen, click here.
November 2, 2009. Recent uploads. Peter Schickele is best known as the creative force behind P.D.Q. Bach, "the oddest of the twenty odd children" of J.S. Bach. Schickele is also recognized as a serious composer in his own right. The Orion Ensemble recently uploaded a performance of Schickele’s Serenade for Three. Note that the third movement contains variations on a theme by P.D.Q. Bach's Oedipus Tex, "opera/oratorio in one cathartic act."
We continue with a much darker piece, Augusta Read Thomas' Angel Musings. It was commissioned by the Orion Ensemble in 1998. This composition consists of two movements, "Nightfall" and "Daybreak." To listen, please click here.
October 26, 2009. This week we’re celebrating the birthday of the great Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti, who was born on October 26, 1685. 1685 was a good year: Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handle were also born that year. Scarlatti wrote 555 sonatas, only a small part of which were published during his lifetime. Vladimir Horowitz and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli were wonderful (and very different) interpreters. Most of Scarlatti’s sonatas were written for harpsichord. We’ll hear four of them played on the modern piano (by the Italian pianist Mauro Bertoli, the American pianist and composer Heather Schmidt, the young Chinese pianist Jie Chen, and Mauro Bertoli again), and then on fortepiano by David Schrader. To listen, please click here.
We would be amiss not to mention Niccolò Paganini, who was also born this week in 1782. Listen here as Albert Markov plays Moses, Variations on One String. Exquisite.
October 19, 2009. Choral works. This week we present a rather unusual selection of choral works. We start with an excerpt from Rachmaninov’s The Vespers: Bogoroditse Devo (Ave Maria), sung by the National Collegiate Chorale of Scotland. We continue our Russian theme with Ya Raduyus, the setting of Psalm 114 by our contemporary and Oregon native, Tim Pack. We’ll finish with the three pieces from Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols: Procession, Bulalalow, and Recession. They are sung by the delightful Brighton School Chamber Choir from Adelaide, Australia under the direction of Michael Griffin. The soprano in Balulalow is Heather Muggridge. To listen, click here.
October 12, 2009. Three Trios. We haven’t featured a trio in a long time, so we decided to present three of them. The Flatiron Trio named themselves after the architectural landmark of their neighborhood in New York City. It’s a truly international ensemble: an Israeli (Nurit Pacht, violin), a Canadian (Jeremy Findlay, cello) and a Russian (Elena Braslavsky, piano), happily making music in New York. We’ll hear them perform Shostakovich’s Trio No. 1, written when the composer was just 17.
The Brooklyn-based Janus Trio is quite unusual: it brings together a flute (Amanda Baker), viola (Beth Meyers) and a harp (Nuiko Wadden). They like to perform modern music, so Debussy (whose Sonata for flute, viola and harp we’ll hear) is almost as far back as they’ll go.
The Lincoln Trio (Desirée Ruhstrat, violin, David Cunliffe, cello and Marta Aznavoorian, piano) is one of Chicago’s most celebrated chamber ensembles. We’ll hear them play Astor Piazzolla’s Otoño Porteño (Autumn), from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. To listen, click here.
October 5, 2009. Camille Saint-Saëns, who was born on October 9, 1935, wrote a lot of rather forgettable music. But he will be remembered for his masterpieces, such as The Carnival of the Animals, the Organ Symphony, and, of course, the Introduction and Rondo Cappricioso. That’s how we’ll begin our playlist, which we created to celebrate the birthday of this wonderful French composer and organist: the Introduction and Rondo Cappricioso is played by Lindsay Deutsch and accompanied by Kuang-Hao Huang. The Havanaise, arranged for flute and played by Kristin Paxinos (with Shelley Trissel at the piano), follows. The famous Swan is then heard in a very unusual arrangement for the saxophone; it’s beautifully played by Otis Murphy. We conclude with the Piano Concerto No. 2, performed by the pianist James Dick with the Texas Festival Orchestra (Pascal Verrot, conductor). To listen, click here.
September 28, 2009. It so happened that we haven’t featured the voice in quite some time. We’d like to make up for this by presenting the soprano Tina Beverly. Ms. Beverly has an agile voice and superb musicality. In this selection, she sings arias from Bach’s Cantata No. 205 and Mozart’s opera Il re pastore. She then brings us two songs by Edvard Grieg: Solveig’s song and With a water-lily. Debussy’s Claire de lune, from Quatre chansons de jeunesse, follows. The last piece in this selection is Glitter and be Gay, from Leonard Bernstien’s opera Candid. William Billingham is the pianist; the violin part in the Bach and the Mozart is performed by Alison Zlotow. To listen, click here.
September 21, 2009. This week 103 years ago Dmitry Shostakovich, a great composer and a tragic figure in the world of classical music, was born. We’ll mark this event with the following selection. First, we’ll hear the Piano Quintet in g minor, opus 57 played by the pianist James Dick and the Eusia String Quartet. To change the mood, we’ll follow with The Pursuit, from the film score to the 1941 movie, The Adventures of Korzinkina (Shostakovich wrote many film scores in his life, both to earn money and to prove that he can write “music for the masses”). This little piece is performed by DUO, a collaboration of the pianists Stephanie Ho and Saar Ahuvia. We’ll conclude with the Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 99 in an old (1969) but wonderful performance by Albert Markov and the Moscow State Orchestra under the baton of Yuri Aranovich. To listen, please click here.
September 14, 2009. Monica Lee started playing the piano at the age of four. She went on to study at the Interlochen Arts Academy, the Saint Louis Conservatory of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. She has performed as soloist and chamber musician in Japan, Russia, Canada, and throughout the United States. Monica currently resides in San Francisco, where she maintains a full studio.
We present what could’ve been a delightful recital: Mozart’s Piano Sonata No.9 in D Major, Sonetto 104 del Petrarca by Liszt, two Preludes by Sergei Rachmaninov (Op.23, No.6 and Op.32, No.10), and Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 6. To listen, click here.
September 7, 2009. This week we celebrate the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, who was born in a small town near Prague on September 8, 1841. We start with Humoresque, played here in a transcription for viola and guitar with Brett Deubner, the violist. Next is the Piano Quintet played by Quintessence. Then Jonita Lattimore sings the American-inspired Lord, A New Song I would Fashion. She’s accompanied by Eric Weimer. We conclude with the String Quartet in E-flat Major, performed by the Pacifica Quartet and Michael Tree. To listen to the playlist, click here. And please don’t forget to sign in to listen to the complete performances.
August 31, 2009. New features. We’d like to let you know about improvements we recently made to the site. First of all, the Compare function. In the past, you didn’t immediately know if there was another recording that could be compared to the one being played. Now you can see this right away: if the Compare button is grayed-out, there are no other recordings, if it’s orange-yellow, there is it least one more. Read about it here.
In conjunction with Compare, we have also created a list of Multiple Performances. More details could be found here.
We have further created a list of all Composers. Read about it here.
And lastly, you can now share the music with everybody; just click the Share button on the player! We write more about it here.