The life of an orchestra musician is marvelous. Mozart, Schubert and Strauss surround you. All day long you hear beautiful music. What other people pay a lot of money for, you get paid to do. You are gifted, you bring joy into people’s lives…

“Aggressive, nasty and violent. That’s us: Estonians.” This is Anu Tali´s warning on her first meeting with the Munich Chamber Orchestra. For her debut, the Estonian conductor has put together a very Baltic programme: Peteris Vasks´ violin concerto…

The story of Caffé Taci, downtown Manhattan: the craziest place in the opera universe, with diamond dealers, losers, up-and-coming singers, opera stars like René Pape, an-85-year-old Russian pianist, aficionados, agents and bohemians. Life is a big…

Debussy’s “La Mer” is a masterpiece of suggestion and subtlety in its rich depiction of the ocean. Several authors have claimed that “La Mer” sounds like nothing before it. As a specialist in French Impressionism, the British pianist and writer Paul…

Berlioz’ “Fantastic Symphony” is widely regarded as one of the most important and representative pieces of the early Romantic period. Leonard Bernstein once called it “the first musical expedition into psychedelia” because of its hallucinatory and…

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…

The Alpine Symphony is one of Strauss’ largest non-operatic conceptions, and the composer himself considered it his best-wrought work in terms of its orchestration. Despite its title, it is not a symphony in the generally accepted sense of the word…

The Symphony No. 5 in E minor by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was composed between May and August 1888. It was first performed, under Tchaikovsky's own baton, in St Petersburg on November 6, 1888. While composing the symphony, Tchaikovsky constantly…

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…

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…