Curated playlist
Honorary members of the Royal Philharmonic Society
- Igor StravinskyIgor Stravinsky once received a score back from his mentor in the mail, returned with a note reading: "Not delivered on account of death of addressee." That mentor was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the most powerful figure in Russian music, and…
- Johannes BrahmsJohannes Brahms once interrupted a friend's toast in Berlin with five blunt words: "Quite right; here's Mozart's health." It was January 1896, near the end of a life spent measuring himself against the dead. He had been called the heir to…
- Maurice RavelMaurice Ravel was born on the 7th of March 1875 in Ciboure, a Basque town in France less than 20 kilometres from the Spanish border. By the time he reached his fifties, he was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.…
- Pyotr Ilyich TchaikovskyPyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky once listened to a playback of his own voice on an Edison recording device and said: "This trill could be better." That was January 1890, in Moscow, and the remark captures something essential about the man: even…
- Aaron CoplandAaron Copland grew up above a Brooklyn shop at 628 Washington Avenue, in a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who had traveled through Scotland just to afford the boat fare to America. His father had no interest in music. His mother…
- Antonín DvořákAntonín Dvořák composed the String Quartet in F major in just three days during a summer holiday in Spillville, Iowa, in 1893. Three days. That single fact captures something essential about the man: a prodigious outpouring of music rooted…
- Hector BerliozHector Berlioz was born on the 11th of December 1803 in the commune of La Cote-Saint-Andre, in south-eastern France, the son of a physician who had never heard of him becoming a composer. His father was a progressive, agnostic doctor…
- Richard StraussRichard Strauss died on the 8th of September 1949 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen with the words "dying is just as I composed it in Tod und Verklärung" on his lips. He was speaking to Alice, his Jewish daughter-in-law, the woman he had spent…
- Sergei RachmaninoffSergei Rachmaninoff stepped onto the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre in May 1892 knowing, he later admitted, that his one-act opera was "sure to fail." He was nineteen years old. The audience disagreed so completely that the theatre agreed on…
- Alexander GlazunovAlexander Glazunov stood at the podium in Paris on the 17th of May 1907 to conduct the last of the Russian Historical Concerts, a man at the absolute peak of his fame. That same year, Oxford and Cambridge each awarded him an honorary…
- Paul HindemithPaul Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, on the 16th of November 1895, and within two decades he would be playing concertmaster at the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra. He was a composer, yes, but also a theorist, a teacher, a violist, a…
- Johann Nepomuk HummelJohann Nepomuk Hummel was taught piano by Mozart at the age of eight, housed and tutored free of charge for two years by the most celebrated composer in Europe. That single fact tells you something about what Hummel's contemporaries…