Free Republic

Rudolf Barshai, who has died aged 86, was the leading Russian viola player of his generation and an important conductor, particularly in the music of Dmitri Shostakovich; he emigrated to Israel in 1977, claiming that he could no longer stand the way in which he was being treated by the Soviet authorities.

Los Angeles Philharmonic Presents Celebración: Opening Night Concert and Gala Live on Classical KUSC Thursday, October 7th at 7 PM The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Music Director Gustavo Dudamel usher in the 2010/11 season with the Celebración: Opening Night Concert and Gala, Thursday, October 7th, at Walt Disney Concert Hall and broadcast live on Classical KUSC. The orchestra is joined by renowned Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez, a close friend of Dudamel, in his Walt Disney Concert Hall debut...

Audio: a production, done in 1977 by Robert Conrad, the founder of WCLV classical radio in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. The script was written by conductor Kenneth Jean and Mathias Bamert is said to have had a role in the production. Video: ascvideo (Arnold Schönberg Center, Wien)

Today is the first day of Rosh Hashana, the holiday that marks the beginning of the Jewish new year. For the next 10 days, through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Jews around the world will gather to chant the prayers of the High Holy Days to melodies that have been used for generations. Some of the melodies will be simple and some complex, and some will be particularly beautiful. What almost none of them will be is “classical”: Western classical composition, the dominant feature of Christian sacred music for more than a millennium, remains mostly absent from Jewish liturgical...

Direct medical evidence? None. Autopsy? Not performed. Medical records? Nowhere to be found. Corpse? Disappeared. Yet according to a recent article in an academic journal, researchers have posited at least 118 causes of death for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. A modest industry of medical speculation has grown up around the subject, evidence of our fascination with what cut down great creative artists in history. In Mozart’s case published speculation began within a month of his death in 1791, and musicologists, physicians and medical scholars have regularly joined the fray ever since. Dr. William J. Dawson, a retired orthopedic surgeon...bibliographer for the...

Thanks to period-music evangelists, breathtaking virtuosity, and millions of listeners, the art form remains vibrant. Anyone inclined to lament the state of classical music today should read Hector Berlioz’s Memoires. As the maverick French composer tours mid-nineteenth-century Europe conducting his revolutionary works, he encounters orchestras unable to play in tune and conductors who can’t read scores. A Paris premiere of a Berlioz cantata fizzles when a missed cue sets off a chain reaction of paralyzed silence throughout the entire sorry band. Most infuriating to this champion of artistic integrity, publishers and conductors routinely bastardize the scores of Mozart, Beethoven, and...

This guy wasn't paying attention when they said to "silence your cell phones..."

If any recent president's life is the stuff of operas, it's Bill Clinton's. There's been comedy, drama, back-stabbing, shouting, crying, death, and many miraculous comebacks. But that's real life. Now art will be imitating life in a project coming together in Little Rock and meant to show how his struggles as a kid raised by a fun-loving mother influenced the making of the 42nd president. Billy Blythe features "a snapshot of a day of his life in Hot Springs in the 1950s," says the opera's producer, Bonnie Montgomery to our Suzi Parker. "Clinton's life is very operatic, over the top,...

...Beethoven's life was as complex and outsize as his art—a roller-coaster ride of willful strife, earthy humor, crushing loneliness, explosive rage and spiritual triumph. Similarly, his music "takes at times the majestic flight of an eagle, and then creeps in rocky pathways," as an 1810 review in the Parisian Tablettes de Polymnie reported. "He first fills the soul with sweet melancholy, and then shatters it by a mass of barbarous chords. He seems to harbor together doves and crocodiles."

Benjamin Lees died of heart failure on Monday, May 31 at North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital in Glen Cove, New York at the age of 86.

I have no idea the standing of the late Sir Adrian Boult (1889-1983, if memory serves me correctly) in the world of music, other than that he was a famous symphony conductor, quite possibly one of the best of the past century. But by the time I met him, in February 1978 in London, he was nearing 90 years old, and had long ago passed the baton on to others. His appearance was a shock to me, because I had not realized how ancient he was at the time; I was seeing a white-haired crooked little man who in no...

On Jan. 14, the violinist Hilary Hahn scored a rare gig for a classical music performer: She appeared on "The Tonight Show." And not just any "Tonight Show," but the "Tonight Show" during the final days of Conan O'Brien's brief tenure as host. Everybody was watching. So it came as no surprise that Hahn's new album, "Bach: Violin and Voice," debuted that week at No. 1 on the Billboard classical charts. No. 1 on the charts: It doesn't get any better than that. Or does it? The dirty secret of the Billboard classical charts is that album sales figures are...

Gustav Mahler Symphony No. 5 Adagietto Part 1 Herbert von Karajan Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra One of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed...enjoy!

...he passed comfortably in his home in Palm Springs California after a long illness. Cause of death was congestive heart disease...

Odd, the pianist Kirill Gerstein thought. A music critic from Houston was coming to interview him in Jacksonville, Fla. Mr. Gerstein’s manager had arranged the meeting, at the Omni Hotel’s J bar, to coincide with a run of concerts last November. Might as well meet the writer, the pianist thought. Kirill Gerstein, a naturalized American citizen of Russian origin, is the latest recipient of the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award. But instead of a critic waiting at the bar, it was the man from the Gilmore festival. And in his hand was an envelope proclaiming Mr. Gerstein the latest winner of...

Sunday, January 3rd at 2 PM Pacific / 3 PM Mountain / 4 PM Central / 5 PM Eastern, Classical KUSC presents a rebroadcast of “On Dangerous Ground: A Tribute to Bernard Herrmann.” This two-hour sound portrait of one of cinema’s greatest composers will be hosted by Jon Burlingame, author, USC professor, and a writer on film music for Variety. The program includes rarely heard interviews with Herrmann himself, and excerpts from his concert music as well as dozens of his great film scores, from Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver. Herrmann’s legendary partnership with Alfred Hitchcock will be showcased with...

Soundtrack albums are the hidden pleasures of pop. Composed and performed to accompany moving images, they're emotional enhancers. This dramatic quality, coupled with the depth of sound-field in full cinema reproduction, ensures that many soundtracks stand apart from their parent films as a listening experience.

Benedictus XVIJoseph Ratzinger  Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music - The Musical Offering in MP3 The Musical Offering A selection of sacred and classical music in Mp3 played by teachers and students of Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music

Gustavo Dudamel is back in town, and Thursday night he conducted a magnificently theatrical performance of Verdi’s Requiem that felt like his first real concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. All Los Angeles, of course, knows that last month Dudamel began his tenure with a free event at the Hollywood Bowl, and that was followed by nervous-making high-profile programs in Walt Disney Concert Hall the next week.

Carl Orff Orff was born in Munich on July 10, 1895. His family was Bavarian and active in the German military. Orff started studying the piano at age five and also took organ and cello lessons. By the time he was a teenager, Orff was writing songs, although he had not studied harmony or composition. His mother helped him set down his first works in musical notation. Orff wrote his own texts and he learned the art of composing, without a teacher, by studying classical masterworks on his own. In 1911-12, Orff wrote a large work for baritone voice,...