Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 33 I. Praeludium:Largo II. Allegro cavalleresco III. Poco Adagio IV. Rondo: Allegretto scherzando Odds are fairly high that you have never heard anything by Danish composer Carl Nielsen. Until the past few decades, the world overlooked this highly original, free-spirited composer. The son of a house […]
Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) Night on Bald Mountain (originally St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain) Under the black cover of night, the followers of darkness revel upon a foreboding mountaintop. The Spirits of Darkness and their minions await the arrival of Chernobog (a dark devil.) He is glorified and a black mass is celebrated into the […]
Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) Pictures at an Exhibition (orchestrated by Maurice Ravel) Victor Alexandrovich Hartmann was a Russian artist and a staunch supporter of the Nationalistic artistic movement that sought to create Russian art in a glorious and contemporary light. A year after his death in 1873 at the age of 39, a commemorative exhibition of […]
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (b Karevo, Russia, March 4, 1839; d St. Petersburg, March 16, 1881) Hopak from the opera The Fair at Sorochynsk The miracle of Russian Romantic music is that after roughly 1,000 years of cultural isolation, the last half of the 19th Century produced some of the greatest musical treasures the world has ever known. The […]