Welcome to Classical Connect - the free classical music site!
If you like classical music, you’ve come to the right place! Classical Connect is your virtual concert hall, featuring thousands of recordings of classical music. If you love piano music, just go to the Browse by Instruments section and access the thousand-plus piano recordings available in our library. If you prefer the violin or the flute, you won’t be disappointed either – in fact, we have music for practically every instrument! If, on the other hand, you’re interested in a particular composer, you can Browse by Composer and select your favorite.
Where do we get our music? Our site allows independent musicians to upload their own recordings, or we may do it on their behalf. Musicians value the special opportunity Classical Connect offers because it allows for their music to be heard around the world. Several hundred musicians have already joined our site. We also have arrangements with several labels, festivals, programs and orchestras, allowing us to use some of their material.
As a visitor to our site you can listen to the first three minutes of any recording. However, by joining our site you’ll have access to all full-length performances. Joining is easy and has many great benefits. You’ll be able to create playlists, comment and vote on recordings, share music with friends, listen to our special programs, and more.
The music you hear upon entry was randomly selected from our library - what we call our Serendipity list. You can always pause it or jump to the next piece. You’ll be able to change the content of these initial selections once you’ve signed in.
To help you navigate the site and use its features, we’ve also created a Help page.
In the mean time, enjoy the music!
The Classical Connect team
July 26, 2010
Arpeggione. Some music can only be performed on the instrument it was written for: think of Beethoven’s piano sonatas or Chopin’s etudes. Bach, on the other hand, loved to take a good piece and use it in very different arrangements. For example, music historians think that his famous Harpsichord Concerto I in d minor, BWV 1052 was based on a lost violin concerto. That concerto, in turn, was arranged by Bach as an organ concerto. And of course nowadays, we usually hear it performed on a modern concert piano – and, when played by someone like Glenn Gould, to an amazing effect.
Franz Schubert wrote a sonata for an arpeggione, a string instrument invented in Vienna around the 1820s. Arpeggiones went out of vogue very soon thereafter, so the sonata got arranged for a number of instruments. It is usually performed on a viola, but we have three different transcriptions: Noah Turner Rogoff plays it on a Cello, Nicholas Santangelo Schwartz – on the Double Bass (!), and Kristin Figard on the Viola. Enjoy!
Welcome to our Virtual Concert Hall
We started Classical Connect with a mission to provide independent musicians with a new venue for their performances. Hundreds of classical musicians have taken advantage of this opportunity, sharing their music with listeners across the world.
We encourage you to join and upload your performances. Once signed in, you’ll be able to create a personal page with your bio, photo and other promotional materials. Since all the recordings on our site are streamed, your performance cannot be downloaded without your permission. In the future, you may also benefit from our plan to introduce fees for certain downloads. These fees will be shared with you, the musician.
Our site accepts MP3 and MP4 files, so if you have a CD recording, you can rip and upload it in this format. For better quality, we recommend using a bit rate of 128 kbps, an 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.
If your performance was recorded on several tracks, then upload each one with a different title. For example, Sonata No. 21, part 1, Sonata No. 21, part 2 and so on. Please let us know and we’ll merge these different movements into one complete performance with the appropriate title.
Please do not upload parts of a composition. Think of Classical Connect as your virtual concert hall: only upload 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.
The Classical Connect team
Benefits of Joining Classical Connect
There are many advantages to joining Classical Connect. The first, and most obvious, is the ability to listen to complete performances. We have more than 2,000 different pieces of classical music, some of them as long as an hour and 50 minutes (yes, that’s how long Mahler’s Third Symphony is!). Once you’re logged in, you can listen to every one of them from start to finish – that’s if you like the performance, of course.
You can also create personal playlists. There’s no limit to how many pieces each playlist can include. You can read more about playlists here. In addition, you can comment and vote on any piece of music in our library. The grades / rankings go from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest), but please only reserve 10s for the truly great performances and use 1s sparingly!
Another advantage includes sharing performances with your friends. Click the Share button on the Player and send a message to your friend on Classical Connect, or simply copy/paste the link into an e-mail. Your friends don’t even need to be members of Classical Connect; they can simply click on the link and listen to the complete performance the same way you do.
Also, you can actively participate in Forums only if you’ve joined the site.
Finally, as you set up your profile, you can select the content of the initial musical selection or omit it entirely.
Joining is easy. Just click here and follow the instructions.
Enjoy!
The Classical Connect team
July 19, 2010
Early Music. We continue our collaboration with Millennium of Music, an early music series created by Robert Aubrey Davis. We recently expanded our collection with three programs about the French-Flemish school. The period, which began in the late 15th century and stretched through the 16th, was one of the most productive in the history of early classical music: its notables include Josquin des Prez, Orlando di Lasso and Jacob Obrecht, to name just a few. These composers were born in what is now the Netherlands but traveled all over Europe, settling in Italy, France, and Spain, absorbing the local styles but also strongly influencing the further development of music. The period is also remarkable for its newly discovered sense of self-awareness: there was a general sentiment that these composers were of a very high order and deserved to be celebrated and preserved. Publishers, such as Ottaviano Petrucci (who is believed to have produced the first book of sheet music) and Tielman Susato, were selecting famous pieces and creating anthologies for the benefit of musicians and the listening public alike. Music from these collections is presented in three programs entitled “Music from the Lowlands.” To listen, click here.
July 12, 2010
Recent Piano uploads. The young Israeli pianist Einav Yarden has performed extensively in recitals and as a soloist with many well-known orchestras such as the Israel Philharmonic and the Minnesota Symphony, among others. She has also won a number of prizes in international competitions. Einav studied at the Peabody Conservatory with Leon Fleisher. You can hear her perform Stravinsky’s piano Sonata. The German pianist Michael Krücker studied in Rotterdam and Düsseldorf with such masters as Paul Badura-Skoda and György Sándor. Michael has an active performing career, playing in many European festivals and concert halls. We’ll hear a rarely performed Sonate mélancolique by Ignaz Moscheles. It is played on an 1844 Erard pianoforte. The pianist Sophia Agranovich is a native of Ukraine where she studied with Alexander Edelman. She then moved to the US and continued at the Juilliard with Sascha Gorodnitzki, also a former Ukrainian, being one of her teachers. We’ll hear Sophia play Liszt’s Liebestraum No.3. Our library contains many more recordings of these pianists, so please browse. To listen to the selected pieces click here.
July 5, 2010
Gustav Mahler. The great Austrian composer was born 150 years ago this week, on July 7, 1860, but his music sounds as raw and tragic today as the day it was written. Nobody ever projected naked emotions with such force. His music is vulnerable, flawed, sometimes sentimental and at the same time noble. He managed to combine the low, even vulgar, and the angelic into one enormous but coherent whole. Mahler was ahead of his time even despite never accepting atonal music. He influenced many composers of the 20th century, from Schoenberg, Webern and Berg to (especially) Shostakovich. A Jew in anti-Semitic Vienna, he converted to Catholicism to get a position with the Vienna Court Opera but was still abused in the press. Superstitious, he was afraid of writing the 9th symphony, trying to deceive faith by not calling Das Lied von der Erde a symphony. But he still died at the age of 50 with exactly nine completed symphonies.
We’re grateful to the Peabody Conservatory for allowing us to present two of Mahler’s symphonies: No. 3 and No. 5. Symphony No. 3 runs for approximately 103 minutes, and the version you hear on our site is probably the longest streaming performance on the Web. You can also listen to the famous Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony as played by the Texas Festival Orchestra.
June 28, 2010
Millennium of Music. We’re proud to present several programs from this long-running series of early music. Hosted by Robert Aubry Davis, these programs are dedicated mostly to European music of the medieval period and the Renaissance, but cover almost one thousand years of music preceding that of Bach’s. The recordings are made by some of the most interesting early music ensembles and feature great composers from all over Europe: the English, such as Thomas Tallis and William Bird; the French-Flemish (Josquin des Prez and Orlando di Lasso); the Italians (Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Claudio Monteverdi), the Spanish (Tomás Luis de Victoria), the Germans (Michael Praetorius), to name just a few. At the moment we have eight programs, but in the future we will be adding many more, so please check this section often. To select a program, click here.
June 21, 2010
Performance Details pages. As our listeners know, many of the Performance Details pages contain liner notes. Very often these notes are written by those who recorded the piece, or, in case of contemporary compositions, by the composers themselves. We also add new descriptions on a regular basis, especially for the larger, historically important compositions. Here, for example, are some thoughts about Diabelli Variations, which Alfred Brendel called "the greatest of all piano works." This is a double treat: first, the pianist, Beth Levin, wrote a very detailed series of notes on each variation, and then we added the notes from Joseph DuBose.
The Variations’ place in the world of piano music may be compared to that of Bach's Goldberg Variations and Johannes Brahms' Handel Variations (some ideas about Brahms’s masterpiece could be found here). And as far as Beethoven is concerned, you may also enjoy the notes on Beethoven’s late sonatas: Hammerklavier, Op. 106, Sonata no. 30, Op. 109 and the last one, Sonata no. 32, Op. 111.