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Aug 6, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Erik Levi
1 hour agoCNN — As a DJ spins music, the athletes twist, whirl and leap — each move a dizzying mix of fancy footwork and contorted limbs. It might seem more like an artform than a sport, but breakdancing — known professionally as breaking — is making its Olympics debut this month in Paris. Breaking has been …
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Sep 1, 2023 | 
classical-music.com | Erik Levi
The Czech composer Bedřich Smetana certainly did not lack self-belief. Writing in his diary in January 1843, he boldly predicted that 'by the grace of God and with His help, I shall one day be a Liszt in technique and a Mozart in composition'.
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Aug 21, 2023 | 
classical-music.com | Erik Levi |Charlotte Smith
'Just imagine a man whose health will never be re-established, and who from sheer despondency makes matters worse rather than better,' wrote Schubert to his friend Leopold Kupelwieser in March 1824; 'just imagine a man whose brightest hopes have come to nothing, to whom happiness of proffered love and friendship offers nothing but anguish, for whom enthusiasm for what is beautiful threatens to vanish altogether, and then ask yourself if such a condition does not represent a miserable and...
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Aug 21, 2023 | 
classical-music.com | Erik Levi
What inspired Zemlinsky's String Quartet No. 2? Written between 1913 and 1915, this epic one-movement composition lays bare all the bitter disappointments he experienced on a personal and professional level after 1900. A doomed love affair with his composition pupil Alma Schindler, who left him to marry Gustav Mahler, had a particularly traumatic impact. But no less damaging was the decline in his fortunes as a composer.
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Aug 14, 2023 | 
classical-music.com | Erik Levi
When did Shostakovich write his Piano Trio No. 2? After completing his Eighth Symphony during the height of the Second World War, Shostakovich turned his thoughts towards a Piano Trio. He had already composed one such work early in his career, but it remained unpublished in his lifetime. This new composition, however, which occupied him from December 1943 to August of the following year, turned out to be rather different from his first effort and was conceived on a grander scale.
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Aug 10, 2023 | 
classical-music.com | Erik Levi
In an impassioned speech delivered at the United Nations in 1958, the great cellist Pablo Casals proclaimed his belief in the universality of music. Music, he argued, was the one artistic form of expression that 'transcends language, politics and national boundaries'. Such idealism, however, stands in stark contrast to what actually happened during the first half of the 20th century, when two world wars ruptured open exchange between music and musicians on opposing sides in these conflicts.
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Aug 8, 2023 | 
classical-music.com | Erik Levi
Weinberg Piano Works, 1951-56: Piano Sonatina; Partita; Piano Sonatas Nos 4 & 5 Stefan Irmer (piano)The early 1950s proved to be a particularly difficult period for Mieczysław Weinberg. Having escaped from his native Poland to the Soviet Union during World War II and suffered immense trauma from leaving behind his family, who were murdered by the Nazis, he became a victim of Stalin's increasingly paranoid antisemitism; he was even temporarily incarcerated in a Soviet jail on trumped-up charges.
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Aug 7, 2023 | 
classical-music.com | Erik Levi
Over gently strumming harp chords, a solo violin sculpts a fervent melody that projects a bewitching mixture of anguish and tenderness. The emotional ambiguity of the opening passage to Bartók's Second Violin Concerto sets the scene for a compelling dialogue between soloist and orchestra encapsulating an astonishing variety of moods.
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Aug 2, 2023 | 
classical-music.com | Erik Levi
Shostakovich was in his late thirties when he composed his Piano Trio No. 2. Though he had emerged from the dangerous situation of the 1930s, when his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had been denounced by Stalin and friends and associates had disappeared during the Soviet leader's Great Purge, life remained difficult. For the first three years of World War II, he continued to live in Leningrad where, during the siege of the city by German forces, he served as a firefighter.
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Jul 24, 2023 | 
classical-music.com | Erik Levi
Internationally acclaimed during the early 1930s as a pedagogue and outstanding viola player, Paul Hindemith's position as the leading German composer of the younger generation seemed unassailable after securing prestigious commissions for new orchestral works from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1930 and '32. Alongside this breakthrough, he had cast off his earlier reputation as a musical iconoclast, modifying his creative outlook to embrace a more accessible style.
