The Surprise Symphony is the best known of the over 100 symphonies by Haydn. Its second movement is the most popular and gave the symphony its name: legend has it that the sudden beat of the timpani was meant to rouse members of the audience who had…

Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8 in B minor, commonly known as the Unfinished, was started in 1822 but left with only two movements complete even though Schubert would live for another six years. Since Schubert's death at the age of 31, the Unfinished…

In the eyes of his contemporaries, Johannes Brahms’s violin concerto was so different from everything that had come before that, after the premiere, a critic stated that it wasn’t a concerto, but a “symphony with violin obligato”. In an interview…

Almost no musical work has had such a powerful influence or evoked as much controversy as Igor Stravinsky's ballet score “The Rite of Spring”. The work's premiere on May 29, 1913, at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, was scandalous. The…

A 45-minute feature on the subject "love", taking as an example the relationships between Clara and Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. The film presents Hélène Grimaud playing excerpts from Schumann's Piano Concerto with the Staatskapelle Dresden…

“The boy with the Wig - Kids on Mozart” shows the fascination of the children for Mozart. In the 30-minute film children have the podium: boys and girls aged between eight and eleven recount Mozart’s life in their own words. In this way, an at times…

René Pape is a star who represents like no other a new generation of opera singers: casual and up-to-date in appearance, hungry for new challenges and open to ambitious experiments. In the musical film My Heart Is Burning René Pape sings and plays…

For this feature, "24 hours Bach" presents the best performers in their field, including John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir founded by him, the English Baroque Soloists, as well as other internationally-known vocal soloists.

The 420-member company of the Deutsche Oper Berlin brought "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg", "Tristan and Isolde" and "Lohengrin" to Tokyo. The privately-operated Tokyo Ballet performed "Kabuki" and "M", in Berlin. Our film takes a look at the work…

In this recording acclaimed pianist András Schiff performs the first part of the fifteen piece cycle “On an Overgrown Path”, written by Czech composer Leós Janácek. Inspired by his Moravian homeland, the music is filled with folk melodies and is…