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
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. If you have a video of your performance on YouTube, you can link it to your personal page: go to Upload or Link Your Performance and paste the YouTube URL in the appropriate field. Your video will play on Classical Connect alongside your audio recordings.
Also, we have created a new feature called Concert Schedules, which allows you to enter your future concerts. Once your event has been entered, two things should happen. First, the concert is displayed on your personal page, below the bio. Second, the concert appears on the combined front-page Concerts Calendar. Moreover, for two days – the day before the concert and the day of the concert itself – there will be a message announcing your concert on the front-page News and Updates tab. This is the very first tab presented to all logged-on users.
On the technical side: 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. Also, we encourage you to leave comments about your performance or the composition.
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
April 12, 2010.
A terrible tragedy befell Poland last Saturday when many leaders of the recently reborn country perished in a plane crash. We will commemorate this event with a selection of Polish music. Poland gave much to the world, and classical music is one of its gifts. From the Renaissance, through the 19th century and such composers as Karol Szymanowski, Andrzej Panufnik, Henryk Górecki and Krzysztof Penderecki in the 20th, Polish composers were on the forefront of European music. We’ll hear Chopin’s Ballade No. 2 in F major, Op. 38 played by the pianist Hayk Arsenyan, and then two pieces by Karol Szymanowski: piano Etude Op. 4 no. 1, performed by Hyunjung Chung, and Mazurka no. 1, Op. 50, played by the pianist Martin Labazevitch. We’ll continue with the Allegretto movement from Krzysztof Penderecki’s Symphony No. 2. To conclude, the venerable American pianist Abbey Simon will play (and, in the manner of Glenn Gould, hum) Chopin’s Sonata No. 2 in b-flat minor, Op. 35, with the famous third movement, the funeral march. To listen, click here.
April 5, 2010
March is so rich on composers’ birthdays, but we had a chance to celebrate just two – that of Chopin, who turned 200, and Bach’s also quite special 325th anniversary. So we missed the birthdays of Maurice Ravel, Pablo Sarasate, Hugo Wolf, Telemann, two great Russians, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky, Bela Bartok, and even Franz Joseph Haydn! We’ll try to catch up this week with the following chronological program. First, the flutists Colleen Matheu performs Telemann’s Fantasia No. 2 for Unaccompanied Flute. Then the pianist Sofya Melikyan plays Andante with variations in f minor by Franz Joseph Haydn. Sonya Bach follows with the piano transcription of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. And at the end we’ll hear Amelia Trio play Ravel’s Piano Trio in a minor. We’ll have more next week, but in the mean time, please click here to listen.
March 29, 2010
The pianist Alon Goldstein, violinist Ilya Kaler and cellist Amit Peled, wonderful instrumentalists in their own right, have been playing together for a number of years. Now they call their ensemble the Tempest Trio. The Tempest has embarked on an exploration of all Beethoven trios for piano and strings. Beethoven wrote piano trios throughout most of his creative life, starting with Op. 1 and finishing with the “Archduke” in 1811. If we count trios without opus numbers, then the total comes to 12, so the Tempest, and its listeners, are set for a wonderful journey. We have three trios in our library, numbers 4, 5, and 7. Today we present Trio no 7 op. 97, “Archduke.” To listen, click here.
March 22, 2010. Bach at 325!
Johann Sebastian Bach was born three-and-a-quarter centuries ago, on March 21 1685, but the freshness and impact of his music remains as true today as the day it was written. Considered by many to be the greatest composer of all time, his compositions are performed by instrumentalists, orchestras, and singers around the world. His music is sought by concertgoers and Internet users alike: Bach, together with Mozart, is the most popular composer on the Web. We could play his music all day long, but we’ll limit our selection to just five pieces. We’ll start with David Schrader playing Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in d minor, BWV 903 on harpsichord. The pianist Elena Baksht will then play English Suite No. 2 in a minor. The cellist Inbal Segev will follow with Prelude and Gigue, from Suite Number 6, BWV 1012. Rachel Barton Pine (violin) will play Sonata No. 1 in G Minor, BWV 1001. We’ll conclude with David Schrader, again, in this case as the organist: he’ll play Toccata and Fugue in d minor, BWV 565. To listen, click here.
March 15, 2010
The cellist Suren Bagratuni won the Silver Medal at the 1986 International Tchaikovsky Competition while still a student at the Moscow Conservatory. Since then he has gone to a distinguished international career as a soloist, recitalist and chamber musician. He has toured worldwide earning enthusiastic praise in both traditional and contemporary repertoire. He has performed with the many major orchestras, including the Moscow Philharmonic under the direction of Valery Gergiev, the Weimar Staatskapelle, Stuttgarter Kammerorchester and other. The Boston Globe called his performance of the Shostakovich d minor sonata “one of the best performances of the year.” Mr. Bagratuni studies at the Moscow Conservatory with such legendary cellists as Daniel Shafran and Natalia Shakhovskaya, and later at the New England Conservatory of Music with Laurence Lesser. We’ll hear Nr. Bagratuni perform two compositions, Bach’s Suite for solo cello BWV 1011 and the Shostakovich sonata mentioned above (he’s accompanied by Sergey Babayan). Please browse our library as we have many other great performances by Mr. Bagratuni. To listen, click here.
March 8, 2010.
Elena Kuschnerova is a Russian-born, German-based "pianist who grabs the imagination," according to the late New York Times critic Harold Schonberg, who also praised her Scriabin recordings. Elena studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Sergei Dorensky. She was influenced by the great and controversial Russian composer Alexander Lokshin (1920-1987), who wrote a variation cycle for her. Ms. Kuschnerova established herself in Germany in 1992. Her recitals and CDs encompass a wide range, from Bach to first performances of works composed for her. The following “virtual recital” will include: J.S. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in c minor, from the first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier, followed by Intermezzo No. 2 in A Major, Op. 118 by Johannes Brahms. We will then hear Scriabin’s Etude No. 12 in d-sharp minor, Op. 8 and Prokofiev’s March from the opera Love to the three oranges." We’ll conclude with Alexander Lokshin’s Prelude and Theme with Variations. It was written in 1982 and dedicated to Elena Kuschnerova. To listen, click here.