Tag: Richard Strauss

  • PROGRAM NOTES: JERUSALEM QUARTET WITH PINCHAS ZUKERMAN & AMANDA FORSYTH

    PROGRAM NOTES: JERUSALEM QUARTET WITH PINCHAS ZUKERMAN & AMANDA FORSYTH

    Richard Strauss String Sextet from Capriccio Capriccio (1942), Richard Strauss’ last stage work, is an opera about opera, constructed as a series of elegant salon conversations dealing with a question that has bedevilled opera lovers for centuries: which is more important, the words or the music? The year is 1775 and the setting is the…

  • PROGRAM NOTES: TARA ERRAUGHT & JAMES BAILLIEU

    PROGRAM NOTES: TARA ERRAUGHT & JAMES BAILLIEU

    Franz Liszt Victor Hugo Poems It may seem strange to think of Liszt as a song composer, so firmly is his name associated with 19th-century virtuoso pianism. But the extraordinary breadth of his musical sympathies is already clearly evident in the wide range of styles and moods in his piano compositions alone, from the bombast…

  • PROGRAM NOTES: YEKWON SUNWOO

    PROGRAM NOTES: YEKWON SUNWOO

    Franz Schubert Sonata in C minor D 958 Schubert’s unabashed admiration for Beethoven is vividly on display in the opening bars of his Sonata in C minor D 958, composed in September 1828, shortly before his death. Schubert had served as a pallbearer at Beethoven’s funeral the year before, and his own death from tertiary…

  • PROGRAM NOTES: MAXIMILIAN HORNUNG & BENJAMIN ENGELI

    PROGRAM NOTES: MAXIMILIAN HORNUNG & BENJAMIN ENGELI

    Robert Schumann Fünf Stücke im Volkston, Op. 102 Long before Martha Stewart made middle-class home furnishings a “thing,” the Biedermeier period (1815-1848) ushered in a bourgeois age of cozy home interiors that celebrated domestic family life and gave music a prominent place within it. Biedermeier Europe enjoyed the blessings of peace after the defeat of…