Composers Datebook
Kanalaren Xehetasunak
Composers Datebook
Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessi...
Atal Berriak
171 atal
H.K. Gruber
In Austrian culture there is a theatrical tradition that pokes fun at anything somber and serious. Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute taps into this in th...
Dvořák reviewed
In 1885, 20-year old violinist Franz Kneisel came to America to become concertmaster of the Boston Symphony. That same year he formed the Kneisel Quar...
Late-night 'Parsifal'
Okay, raise your hand if you have ever stayed up til midnight to attend the premiere showing of a new film — extra points if you attended in costume a...
Antheil's 'Joyous Symphony'
On New Year’s Eve, 1948, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the first performance of the Symphony No. 5 by the American composer Georg...
A Lehar premiere in Vienna
On this date in 1905, Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehár conducted the first performance of his new operetta, The Merry Widow. He was sure it would...
Quartets by Debussy and Ravel
While hardly twins, the String Quartets of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel are often linked in the minds of music lovers and record companies. Admire...
Humperdinck for the Animal Channel?
On today’s date in 1910, the Metropolitan Opera premiered a new opera by German composer Engelbert Humperdinck, already famous for his opera Hansel an...
Airs and poems by Kernis and Chausson
In the hands of a great performer, the violin can sing with the personality and intensity of a great opera singer. Pyrotechnics may dazzle, but nothin...
A $400 finale for Sibelius
On this day in 1926, Walter Damrosch conducted the New York Symphony in the first performance of the last major orchestral work of Finnish composer Je...
Toscanini and Vivaldi
On today’s date in 1937, as a Christmas gift to the nation, the NBC radio network broadcast the first NBC Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by Artu...
Safe passage for Rachmaninoff
Okay, how’s this for a movie scene worthy of Doctor Zhivago:
It’s October 1917 and Lenin has overthrown the Tsarist government of Russia. A comp...
Humperdinck's 'Into the Woods'?
On today’s date in 1893, the opera Hansel and Gretel by 39-year-old German composer Engelbert Humperdinck received its premiere performance at the Cou...
Puccini's birthday
Opera fanatics are a passionate lot. “It’s an addiction,” they say. “Something to die for.”
Now, if opera is an addiction, then today’s date ma...
Diamond's First
In all, American composer David Diamond wrote 11 symphonies, spanning some 50 years of his professional career. The last dates from 1991, and the firs...
Mozart in Salzburg, Bloch in America
In the spring of 1775, shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, and the sparks of the American Revolution burst into flames at the Ba...
Wendy Carlos synthesizes Purcell and Bach
The Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange opened in New York City on this date in 1971. The music was composed, and in some cases re-composed, by We...
Contrasting premieres by Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich
It’s strange to read the doubts Tchaikovsky expressed in letters about many of his greatest musical works, which he first would dismiss as failures, o...
'Leif' insurance for Schubert?
There’s an old joke that Schubert wrote two symphonies: one unfinished, and the other endless — the reference being to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony...
On Beethoven, Saint-Saens, and fossil-hunting
He was dubbed the French Beethoven, and like Ludwig van, was famous as both a composer and a pianist. Camille Saint-Saëns was born in Paris in 1835, a...
Dvořák's 'Toy Story?'
On today’s date in 1893, Anton Seidl conducted the New York Philharmonic in the first performance of Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 (From the New Wor...
Roumain's 'Ghetto Strings'
From its founding in 1986 the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet has both commissioned new works and arranged old ones for their ensemble of four virtuoso gui...
Mahler and Schoenfield at the Vaudeville?
On today’s date in 1895, Gustav Mahler conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in the first complete performance of his own Symphony No. 2.
Mahler’s S...
Ravel and Zaimont
La Valse — one of the most popular orchestral works by Maurice Ravel — was performed for the first time this day in 1920 by the Lamoureux Orchestra in...
Bizet and Menotti on TV in the 1950s
On this day in 1952, thirty-one theaters nationwide offered the first pay-per view Met opera telecast. This was a regularly-scheduled performance of B...
Morton Gould
Today's date marks the birthday anniversary of Morton Gould, a quintessentially American composer, conductor and advocate for music, who was born in R...
A sequel by Berlioz
These days, no one is surprised if a popular film generates a series of sequels or even prequels, but back in the 1830s the idea of a composer coming...
Beethoven and Kernis in a somber mood
On this date in 1813, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 was played for the first time in Vienna. The occasion was a benefit concert in honor of the Austrian...
The New York Phil and Pearl Harbor
Maybe you’re one of those die-hard classical music fans who records your favorite orchestra’s radio broadcasts. Starting in the 1950s, home tape recor...
Brubeck's birthday
Today marks the anniversary of the birth of American composer and pianist Dave Brubeck. Born in Concord, California on December 6, 1920, he would beco...
Janáček's 'Glagolitic'
So what do you call a setting of the Latin mass that is not in Latin? Well, if you’re Moravian-born composer Leoš Janáček, you call it Glagolitic,...
Tchaikovsky and North endure unkind cuts
Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto was first performed on today’s date in 1881. The premiere took place in Vienna with Adolf Brodsky the violin soloist and...
Jazz Age music by Gershwin and Harbison
It was wet and cold in New York on today’s date in 1925, but a curious crowd gathered at Carnegie Hall for a concert by the New York Symphony. Walter...
Bartok in Minneapolis
On today’s date in 1949, Northrop Auditorium in Minneapolis was the venue for the world premiere performance of Béla Bartók’s last orchestral piece: h...
'Four Weddings and a Funeral' by Clarke and Wagner?
Because it's often played at weddings, the Trumpet Voluntary is one piece of Baroque music that just about everyone has heard. Once attributed to famo...
Massenet (and Laurie Anderson)
On today’s date in 1885, the Paris Opera gave the first performance of Le Cid, the 11th opera written by the French composer Jules Massenet.
Le...
New York City 'firsts' of Rossini and Cole Porter
It was on this date in 1825 that the United States had its first date with authentic Italian opera. This was a performance of Gioacchino Rossini's The...
Rachmaninoff and Hanson get romantic
According to historians, the 19th Century was the great age of Romanticism — but tell that to Sergei Rachmaninoff and Howard Hanson! On today’s date,...
Spacey music by Strauss and Ligeti
Also Sprach Zarathustra, a tone poem by Richard Strauss, was first performed in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, on this day in 1896, with the composer con...
A pre-premiere premiere by John Corigliano
On today’s date in 1997, violinist Joshua Bell and the San Francisco Symphony gave the premiere performance of an 18-minute Chaconne for Violin and Or...
Tailor-made music by Walter Piston
On today’s date in 1955, the Boston Symphony was celebrating its 75th anniversary season with the premiere performance of a brand-new symphony — the s...