Jean Sibelius – The Architect of Northern Light
The hall is dark enough that you can hear the architecture. It is winter outside, that kind of northern winter that does not so much snow as restrain, and inside the orchestra waits with…
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Late Romantic
Episodes on Mahler, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, and Richard Strauss examine the expanded orchestra, opera, nationalism, and late-Romantic intensity.
Richard Strauss – The Architect of Operatic Shock and Grace
Richard Strauss was born in 1864 in Munich, a city whose opera house was both a workplace and a pulpit for his father, Franz, principal horn and uncompromising guardian of classical virtues. Franz Strauss…
Rachmaninoff
The hall is full but strangely quiet, the kind of hush that happens when an audience senses a performance will not be “played” at them so much as drawn out of the room like…
Giacomo Puccini – The Poet of the Human Voice
It is a crisp winter night in Milan in 1896. The lights are low, the orchestra breathes, and on stage four young men shiver in their attic apartment. They burn manuscripts to keep warm,…
Gustav Mahler – The Symphonist of the Universe
On a spring day in May of 1911, a funeral procession wound its way through the streets of Vienna. Thousands lined the path, musicians, admirers, ordinary citizens, all come to bid farewell to Gustav…