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
February 15, 2010
The young pianist Irina Klyuev was born in Nikšić, Montenegro. She started her studies in her hometown and then continued on at the University of Montenegro. Later in London, she studied with Leonid Kontorovsky and Irina Ossipova, among others. There she received the John Lill and Colin Davis scholarships, and later took classes with Jeno Jando at the Royal Academy of Music, Dublin. Irina Klyuev was among the winners of a number of international piano competitions. We’ll hear Irina play J.S. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in B flat minor, from Book 2 of Well-Tempered Clavier. She then performs Ondine, from Ravel’s Gaspar de la Nuit. We’ll conclude with two rarely performed pieces. First comes Arnold Schoenberg’s angular Piano Piece no. 3, and then a little bon-bon from the mid-19th century French composer and pianist Charles-Valentin Alkan called Allegro Barbaro. To listen, click here.
February 8, 2010
John Ferguson is a pianist whose performances have been praised for their “proselytizing zeal” and "impressive qualities of pianistic brilliance.” He’s also a composer and a conductor. His recitals feature some of the most difficult works in keyboard literature, including Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata, Bach's Art of Fugue, and Rzewski's The People United Will Never be Defeated. Ferguson's performances have also included such rarities as Liszt's arrangements of Beethoven's symphonies, music from the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, and a wide range of contemporary music, including his own compositions. We’ll hear Franz Liszt’s Legend no. 2 "St. Francis Walking on the Waves," then Allegretto from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, arranged for the piano by Liszt. We’ll continue with Mr. Ferguson’s own composition, Duo for Piano and Vibraphone. We’ll then hear Sonata V for prepared piano by John Cage’s and will conclude with Anton Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra Op. 10, with Mr. Ferguson conducting. To listen, click here.
February 1, 2010
Franz Schubert, the great Austrian composer, was born on January 31, 1797 in Alsergrund, which is now a part of Vienna. He lived most of his life in that city and died a short 31 years later. Still, he left us with a large body of work of supreme quality, including more than 600 Lieder, great piano sonatas and other instrumental music, and nine symphonies. We created a small playlist to celebrate Schubert’s birthday. First, you’ll hear Impromptu Op. 90 No. 3, played by the pianist Xiang Zou; then an arrangement for the violin of the song Ave Maria, played by Albert Markov. We follow with two Lieder: Der Wanderer an den Mond, sung by the baritone Thomas Meglioranza, and Im Frühling, performed by the soprano Hyunah Yu. We’ll finish with the Wanderer Fantasy, played by the pianist Alon Goldstein. To listen, click here.
January 25, 2010
Jeffrey Biegel is one of today's most respected artists, having created a multi-faceted career as a pianist, composer and arranger. His recent recordings include Leroy Anderson's 'Concerto in C,' conducted by Leonard Slatkin with the BBC Concert Orchestra and his own Vivaldi transcriptions for piano, both on the Naxos label. He also recorded the complete Sonatas by Mozart for the e1 label. Mr. Biegel is currently assembling a global commissioning project for Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's next work for piano and orchestra for the 2011-13 seasons. In 2010, Naxos will release Mr. Biegel's world premiere recording of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's Millennium Fantasy (2000) and Peanuts Gallery. Mr. Biegel joined 18 co-commissioning orchestras for Lowell Liebermann's Concerto no. 3 for Piano and Orchestra, composed exclusively for him for the 2006-07-08 seasons.
We have a large selection of Mr. Biegels’s recordings, but today we’re presenting just one piece, Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto no. 3 in d minor. To listen, click here.
January 18, 2010
Gary Noland’s music has received very high praise from some of this era’s leading musicians. He was born in Seattle in 1957 and raised in Berkeley, next to the famous People’s Park. As an adolescent, Gary lived for a time in Salzburg and Garmisch-Partenkirchen (home of Richard Strauss), where he absorbed many musical influences. He studied music at U.C. Berkeley, then at the Boston Conservatory, and finally Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. Gary confesses to having “very restless tonal ears” and feels closest to composers with “all-encompassing” harmonic palettes, such as Strauss, Mahler, Korngold, Hugo Wolf, Ernst von Dohnanyi, David del Tredici, Frederic Rzewski and György Ligeti, to name just a few. He’s not terribly fond of “harmonically limited” music... We create a playlist consisting of the following works: Fantasy in E Minor for cello & piano (Op. 24), Humoresque for piano (Op. 3), Romance for viola & piano (Op. 10), Grande Rag Brillante (Op. 15), and Septet for clarinet, alto sax, French horn, two violins, double bass, and piano (Op. 43). To listen, click here.
January 11, 2010
The pianist Beth Levin is an acclaimed recitalist, concerto soloist, chamber musician and recording artist. Her repertory is broad, from Bach's Goldberg Variations to Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, to the romantics such as Schubert and Chopin. You can listen to the Diabelli in our library, but today we decided to present a selection from the recently uploaded complete set of 24 piano Preludes Op. 28 by Frédéric Chopin. Here are eight of them: no. 4 in e minor; no.7 in A major, no. 8 in f-sharp minor, no. 11 in B major, no. 12 in g-sharp minor, no. 13 in F-sharp major, no. 15 in D-flat major ("Raindrop Prelude"), and no. 19 in E-flat major. To listen, click here.