When the Berlin magazine "Signale für die Musikalische Welt" announced a piano work contest in 1909, Szymanowski submitted a combination of an old fugue he had composed back in 1905 with a short, ...

A jazz quintet performing eight classically-inspired Preludes and Duke Ellington's wistful "Prelude to a Kiss"? How could that possibly work? In the capable hands of pianist Jeb Patton (who wrote the ...

The young Rachmaninov knocked out this pianistic pinnacle aged just 19 years old. Why has it managed to remain a favourite for such a long time? After he emerged from the Moscow Conservatory as a ...

In the early 1700s, Johann Sebastian Bach did something few, if any, composers had ever done. He composed six suites for the cello — a four stringed instrument that, at the time, was relegated to the ...

This is one of Chopin's most mournful works has lived long in the memory thanks to Jack Nicholson, or all people. When you think of Chopin, you don't necessarily think of incurable sadness and ...

Expressive asynchrony, a vestige of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century "melodic rubato," occurs when notationally solid chords are either arpeggiated or performed with a slight desynchronization ...