Here’s a great article on classical music: The New Yorker Reviews the Beethoven and Shostakovich symphony cycles at the Lincoln Centre. I was made aware of this excellent example of music criticism via a post by Charles Noble on the Daily Observations blog. Sample extract: Yet the two composers [ie Beethoven and Shostakovich] are not […]

I am enjoying Andre Previn’s version of the complete incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the London Symphony Orchestra. This seems to be the highest recommendation for anyone looking for the complete orchestral music. The Pengiun Guide To Compact Discs & CDs calls it: ‘[A] wonderfully refreshing complete score. The veiled pianissimo of […]

Here’s Bernstein’s rationalisation on why he considered Beethoven the greatest composer who ever lived. It’s from his book The Joy of Music, in the chapter entitled Why Beethoven?, and it’s told in the form of a dialogue between Berstein (L.B.) and an unnamed Lyric Poet (L.P.). After much discussion around the subject of Beethoven’s melody, […]

Many commentators remark on the amount of repetition within the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No.6. Antony Hopkins, in his book The Nine Symphonies of Beethoven, sees it as another metaphor for nature: One of the most notable characteristics of the entire first movement is its exploitation of repetition, the repetition of pattern that we […]

Was Beethoven a Classical or a Romantic composer? The 6th Symphony seems to present the strongest case for the latter – it’s a programmatic work, and program music is a distinctive element of much romantic music. It was written in 1808, just three years after Wordworth finished his 13-book Prelude, when the romantic movement in […]