100 years of “Rhapsody in Blue”

February 12, 2024

“Rhapsody in Blue” by George Gershwin premiered 100 years ago today, on February 12, 1924.

Here’s the great pianist Yuja Wang with Camerata Salzburg conducted by Lionel Bringuier:

Happy 80th birthday to John Eliot Gardiner!

April 20, 2023

The English conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner was born on April 20, 1943. When I was starting to become a fan of classical music, his fresh, energetic approach got me excited about listening to Beethoven’s complete symphonies.

Here he is conducting Beethoven’s Ninth, performed by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir in 2020:

Here’s an interview with him:

Something he says in that interview is very relevant to Beethoven’s Ninth:

There is a difference in conducting a choir and an orchestra, but I try to minimize it, because part of my aim is always to try to get the orchestra to imitate voices, to “speak their lines” … to give a sense of rhetoric, a sense of the underlying narration of the music. So I try to make [the orchestra] as choral as possible, and I try to make my choir as orchestral as possible.

300 years of The Well-Tempered Clavier

November 18, 2022

300 years ago this year, in 1722, Bach finished the first of two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier.

Wikipedia says this sprawling composition — “two sets of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys for keyboard” — “is generally regarded as one of the most important works in the history of classical music.”

Here’s the first of the two “books,” starting with the beautifully serene Prelude in C: