Klassik

The BBC Proms is the world's biggest and longest-running classical music festival and one of the jewels in the crown for the BBC. Held every summer at the Royal Albert Hall in London and across the UK, it is one of the strongest brand names in the music world and attracts a glittering array of artists and orchestras from the UK and around the world. Whether you're a first-time visitor or an experienced Prommer, watching at home or listening on radio or online, the BBC Proms Guide is an excellent companion to the festival, which you can treasure and return to in years to come. <BR><BR>Filled with concert listings and articles by leading writers, the BBC Proms Guide offers an insight into the performers and repertoire, as well as thought-provoking opinion pieces about music, musicians and music-making.

Nigel Kennedy is one of the world's foremost violinists. His achievements have been met with great acclaim, not least his ability, both as performer and composer, to move across and blend an extraordinary range of musical genres and styles, resisting any notion of classification. Yet he remains a controversial figure, having rocked the classical music establishment with his radical innovations and uncompromising views. Paul Munden has followed Nigel Kennedy's musical journey for many years, and here sets down his reflections on everything he has gained from that experience. From a poet's perspective, he writes about Kennedy's extraordinary output, indeed the poetry of his playing. A sequence of chapters exploring various themes is interspersed with original poems, the idea deriving from Kennedy's own improvised transitoires.

By questioning when a group of songs ought to be understood not merely as a collection, but as a cycle, Sly shows that Britten's personal selection and arrangement is indispensable to understanding these cycles' extra-musical communication.The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Winter Words (poems by Hardy) and Songs and Proverbs of William Blake - composed in 1945, 1953 and 1965 respectively - each represent a philosophical exploration. The terrains set out by the three poets are distinct, but also engage one another in important and unexpected ways. Their cyclic architectures are expressed not only in their poetic arrangement, but in their musical settings. Key relationships and motive remain central for Britten. Keys convey a network of interconnections, create groupings of songs, and establish levels of tonal affinity or distance. Motive - often intervals that can fit into any melodic, harmonic or rhythmic context - is used to create aural affinities between or among individual songs. This book also offers a broader narrative revealing Britten's evolving philosophical convictions in post-war Britain.

The lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing musical careers of four extraordinary women from a stunning debut biographer. <BR><BR>'Fabulous.' Sunday Times 'A rare gift.' Financial Times 'Passionate ... Vivid ... Timely.' Telegraph 'Readable and inspiring.' Guardian 'Compelling ... Ambitious ... Poignant.' Spectator 'Magnificent.' Kate Mosse 'Riveting.' Antonia Fraser 'A breath of fresh air.' Kate Molleson 'Fascinating.' Alexandra Harris 'Wonderful.' Claire Tomalin 'Splendid.' Miranda Seymour 'Remarkable.' Fiona Maddocks 'Pioneering.' Andrew Motion 'Brilliant' Helen Pankhurst <BR>Ethel Smyth (b.1858): Famed for her operas, this trailblazing queer Victorian composer was a larger-than-life socialite, intrepid traveller and committed Suffragette.<BR><BR>Rebecca Clarke (b.1886): This talented violist and Pre-Raphaelite beauty was one of the first women ever hired by a professional orchestra, later celebrated for her modernist experimentation.<BR><BR>Dorothy Howell (b.1898): A prodigy who shot to fame at the 1919 Proms, her reputation as the 'English Strauss' never dented her modesty; on retirement, she tended Elgar's grave alone.<BR><BR>Doreen Carwithen (b.1922): One of Britain's first woman film composers who scored Elizabeth II's coronation film, her success hid a 20-year affair with her married composition tutor. In their time, these women were celebrities. They composed some of the century's most popular music and pioneered creative careers; but today, they are ghostly presences, surviving only as muses and footnotes to male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten - until now. Leah Broad's magnificent group biography resurrects these forgotten voices, recounting lives of rebellion, heartbreak and ambition, and celebrating their musical masterpieces. Lighting up a panoramic sweep of British history over two World Wars, Quartet revolutionises the canon forever.

The autobiography of one of the 20th century's most innovative and wittiest composers/performers/authors who witnessed the birth of modern music.Perfect Pitch tells the compelling story of Nicolas Slonimsky. A boy prodigy as a pianist, Slonimsky fled pre-Communist Russia, reaching Paris at the height of another revolution-one in music and the arts. His early association with conductor Serge Koussevitzky brought him into contact with many of the era's greatest talents, including Igor Stravinsky and Serge Prokofiev. Emigrating to Boston in 1925, he embarked on a writing career, authoring key works still in print decades after their first publication, including Music Since 1900, a chronological history; Lexicon of Musical Invective, which proved definitively that new works are rarely understood in their time; and Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, which inspired generations of composers and performers, including jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Known for his sharp wit, Slonimsky appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and was befriended by Frank Zappa. Perfect Pitch captures a life that was rich with discovery and invention and spanned a century of revolutions and explorations. This new edition is enhanced with several previously unpublished photographs, an extensive oral history, and several original essays, some reprinted for the first time.

The BBC Proms is the world's biggest and longest-running classical music festival and one of the jewels in the crown for the BBC. Held every summer at the Royal Albert Hall in London, it is one of the strongest brand names in the music world and attracts a glittering array of artists and orchestras from the UK and around the world. Whether you're a first-time visitor or an experienced Prommer, watching at home or listening on radio or online, the BBC Proms Guide is an excellent companion to the festival, which you can treasure and return to in years to come. <BR>Filled with concert listings and articles by leading writers, the BBC Proms Guide offers an insight into the performers and repertoire, as well as thought-provoking opinion pieces about music, musicians and music-making. The contents for 2023 include a specially commissioned short story by Man Booker Prize-nominated author Madeleine Thien; an exploration of the mysterious art of conducting; and an investigation of the connections between music and the human body and spirit - including a 'mental health' Proms playlist. We celebrate the unashamedly Romantic and nostalgically bittersweet music of Sergey Rachmaninov, 150 years after his death; we throw the spotlight on Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Dora Pejacevic, Croatia's first major woman composer; and we delve into the sonic space dust of experimental legend György Ligeti, whose music Stanley Kubrick used to other-worldly effect in 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut. Plus, hear from an array of Proms artists in our series of Spotlight interviews.

Following a disastrous premiere given by the under-rehearsed London Symphony on October 27, 1919 with the composer conducting and Felix Salmond as soloist, Elgar's last great work only very gradually entered the repertoire. Besides Salmomd, the only cellist to champion the work in the composer's lifetime was Beatrice Harrison, who also was the first to record the entire concerto in 1928 with a much-better rehearsed LSO conducted by Elgar. In the following decades the concerto's popularity grew slowly thanks to performances and recordings by Pablo Casals, Paul Tortelier and Mstislav Rostropovich, whose student Jacquline du Pré's performances and recordings served to push the work into the permanent repertoire. The study score offered here is a thoroughly corrected edition first prepared by Nancy M. Bradburd and Clinton F. Nieweg first issued as a large score in 2008. The large conductor's score and orchestra parts are now also for sale from Serenissima Music.

Die Klaviersuite Nr. 3 "Luo Zuo and Folk Song" wurde 2015 komponiert. Das Werk greift den Stil der Volksmusik der Yi-Minderheit vom Nord- und Südufer des Roten Flusses in Yunnan auf. "Luo Zuo" ist ein repräsentativer Volkstanz der Yi-Minderheit, aber das Werk stellt nicht den Tanz in den Vordergrund, sondern den Ausdruck ihres Geistes und ihrer Eigenschaften sowie den Optimismus und die Begeisterung. Das Lied wird auch als Volkslied bezeichnet und wird in den Bergen gesungen, um romantische Gefühle und Freiheit auszudrücken.

"Chinese Dream" wurde 2014 fertiggestellt und gewann im selben Jahr die Goldmedaille bei der CCTV Piano Grand Final Competition. Das Werk wurde durch das von Konfuzius für das "I Ging" geschriebene "Yi Zhuan" inspiriert. Das "I Ging" ist die Quelle der chinesischen Kultur. Um die Essenz der chinesischen Kultur zu vererben, schrieb Konfuzius eine Reihe von zehn Kommentaren, die auch als die "Zehn Flügel" bekannt sind. Der taiwanesische Professor Zeng Shiqiang sagte einmal: "Konfuzius träumte davon, dass die "Zhou Yi" die Welt beeinflussen und zur Einheit verhelfen könnten."Schwierigkeitsgrad: 5

Composed in 1839, Romeo et Juliette is a unique work which straddles the opera and symphonic genres. Berlioz himself used the term "Symphonie dramatique" to characterize it. With three vocal soloists and a triple chorus accompanied by large orchestra, the number of vocal soli is less than what was normally employed for operas of the era and is closer to the forces employed by Beethoven in his Symphony No.9. Much of the drama is supplied by Berlioz's exquisite orchestral writing, elevating the orchestra to a full participant in the unfolding drama of the classic Shakespeare tragedy - in a French adaptation by Émile Deschamps. The work was given its premiere on November 24, 1839 in Paris at the Conservatoire, with voices, chorus and orchestra conducted by the composer. The present vocal score is a digitally restored reissue of the one prepared by Richard Kleinmichel in 1901 to coincide with the complete edition of Berlioz's work under the joint editorship of Charles Malherbe and Felix Weingartner by Breitkopf und Härtel. Printed in a convenient, easy-to-read A4 size, this vocal score will be a useful addition to the libraries of vocalists, choruses and rehearsal pianists alike. In contrast to so many of the on-demand scores now available, this one comes with all the pages and the images have been thoroughly checked to make sure it is actually readable. Matching large conductor's score and orchestral parts are also available from Serenissima Music.

Many of Schubert's six hundred songs were composed quickly, and often in the midst of of a gathering of friends loudly revelling or performing other music. Sometimes that remarkable facility would be exercised while walking in company through the woods round Vienna. John Watson has composed a sequence of scenes from this prodigious working life - sometimes in Schubert's own voice, sometimes in the voices of critics or friends. Here are glimpses - forming a song cycle, as it were - depicting Schubert at work or between songs, until the final fortnight's struggle when he leaves them behind.

In Harmony: The Complementary Musical Tales of the Brockton Symphony Orchestra, Sharon Civic Orchestra, and Sharon Community Chamber Orchestra is a stirring, historical account of these three Massachusetts ensembles. Each chapter documents the orchestras' operations ranging from their founders to the conductors, repertoire, players, soloists, volunteers, fundraisers, behind-the-scenes realities, and special features. While details of each organization are presented in depth, a seasoning of interesting, humorous, and at times tragic human-interest stories make these tales come alive. Musicians, audience members, supporters, and readers with a passion for history will find connections to the events told here. Welcome to the inside world of these venerable ensembles which take their places in the history of orchestras with pride. In Harmony is the most extensive and intriguing exploration into community orchestras in the literature. Musical portraits are enlivened by real-life adventure stories such as survival by WWII refugees, the guarding of Stradivari violins, performing during power failures, and the dodging of puddles caused by leaking concert hall ceilings. Most notable are the contributions made by core players whose passion for orchestral music-making inspires them to share their talent, time, and commitment with the community, often as part of their life's work. Over time, thousands of audience members have enjoyed their concerts, scores of youth musicians have been awarded performance opportunities and scholarships, and players have felt great satisfaction in their calling to perform. Significant details illuminate the history of the Brockton Symphony Orchestra dating back to 1925 and the central roles that women played in the establishment of the Sharon Civic Orchestra and Sharon Community Chamber Orchestra. The orchestras have been led by conductors from both the local and national stage. Famous performers such as Charles Castleman, Midori, and Gil Shaham were guest soloists with the Brockton Symphony during the early days of their careers. The overall cavalcade of esteemed stars included Karl Ulrich Schnabel, Leonard Rose, Samuel Mayes, Boston Symphony Orchestra members and many others! The conductors, soloists, volunteers, and most importantly, the play

The Polovtsian Dances from Borodin's opera Prince Igor consist of two numbers from the opera's second act. The first (no.8 in the opera) is the 'Dance of Polovtsian Maidens' while the remaining dances are taken from the second act finale (no.17). Borodin worked sporadically for almost 18 years on Prince Igor but it was left in an incomplete chaotic state upon his death in 1887. The dances here were selected and partially orchestrated by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov for an 1879 concert performance and subsequently revised by him after the opera's publication in 1888. This newly engraved edition by Clinton F. Nieweg and Nancy M. Bradburd has been meticulously researched from authoritative sources so that Borodin's masterful dances are available for the enjoyment of professionals and amateurs alike. This edition differs from the one by Richard W. Sargeant in that it is drawn directly from the opera and includes the parts for chorus, while Sargeant's is for orchestra alone. The large conductor's score and orchestral parts are also now available from Serenissima Music - the only authorized publisher of Nieweg's editions.