Frédéric Chopin Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) and Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888) were two romantic composers who wrote extensively for the piano - so much so that they are often regarded as "piano composers." Today, I’d like to examine and compare the sonatas...

What piece of choral music is performed most often?I haven’t been able to find any statistics, but I bet that it’s a tie between Messiah by George Frideric Handel and Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. The first of those pieces reverently tells the story of the birth of...

Let’s consider three very important conductors of the war years – Richard Strauss, Herbert von Karajan and Wilhelm Furtwängler.  They all conducted before Hitler and his ghoulish leadership team, that’s not in doubt.  Yet if we consider their very different...

Renée Fleming, Opera Ambassador to the World of SportRenée Flemingdid a top-notch job of singing our national anthem at the Super Bowl last night, don’t you think? She is a heck of a singer.In case you missed it, here it is . . . Today, the day after, tweets are...

Harmonic rhythm is the rate at which the underlying harmonic chords change in a piece of music. If you’re listening to a piece and the chords change at the rate of once a measure (from the tonic [I] to the dominant [V], or whatever), that piece has a faster harmonic...

On December 10th, I wrote that Alan Gilbert is the finest Music Director that the New York Philharmonic has had during the last five decades.That statement – that he is the finest – logically demands that I comment about the Music Directors who preceded him. So here I...