Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) is one of Mozart’s five great repertoire operas alongside Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte and Die Zauberflöte. A typical ‘Singspiel’, a form in which all the dialogue is…

Gidon Kremer is one of the most headstrong and original artists in the music business and has been hailed once by Herbert von Karajan as the world’s best violinist. His return to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partitas was a major event. Kremer’s first…

Mussorgskis monumental “national music drama” Khovanshchina in the brilliant instrumentation of Dmitri Shostakovich is regarded as one of the most important works of Russian Opera. The five-act opera about the Moscow Uprising of 1682 was unfinished…

Four decades after bursting onto the European musical scene, American pianist Stephen Kovacevich remains one of the great living soloists, chamber musicians and conductors. Also known as Stephen Bishop, he has appeared on concert stages worldwide…

As a very young man, Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868) wrote several humorous one-act operas. These so-called “farse giocose“ are full of saucy elegance, sizzling wittiness, cheeky orchestration and touching lyricism. Four of these gems, filmed at the…

Alfred Brendel is arguably the most outstanding exponent of Schubert’s piano music currently before the public, a man capable of bringing to vibrant life both the verve of this music as well as its poetic intensity and intellectual depth. In this…

First staged at the Weimar Court Theatre under the baton of Richard Strauss in 1893, who hailed it as “a masterpiece of the highest quality”, Humperdinck's debut opera Hänsel und Gretel has remained a solid favourite since its 1893 première…

With its recordings of Mozart’s string quartets Nos. 14 to 19, the Hagen Quartet exhibits some of the composer’s most refined compositional thinking and a remarkably wide range of emotions. These quartets were composed in the early 1780s and served…

“And the Beethoven! They played Beethoven differently from the way Beethoven had been played before!” Said the composer William Schuman, then president of New York’s Juilliard School of Music, who initiated the Juilliard String Quartet as a resident…

The Merry Widow (Die Lustige Witwe) had its premiere at Vienna's Theater an der Wien in 1905. The operetta, which tells the story of a wealthy widow in search of a new husband was a major success for its composer Franz Lehár (1870-1948) and quickly…