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The bulk of today’s podcast is dedicated to an ambitious work – Mendelssohn’s Second symphony. The 'Lobgesang' (or 'Hymn of Praise') was commissioned by the city of Leipzig from its Kapellmeister...

The opening piece, Plaisir d'amour (literally "The pleasure of love") takes its text from a poem by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1755–1794), which appears in his novel Célestine. The refrain...

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A pair of Verdi podcasts are available for your listening pleasure. They are:

Giuseppe Verdi was to opera in the Italian tradition what Beethoven was to the symphony. When he arrived on the scene...

Happy New Year!

For 2021, we launch a new thread of Short Stories - highlights from our daily podcasts that venture into the world of lyrical, operatic or just plain interesting music we may (or...

Throughout December, we have featured a Beethoven series on our Podcasting Channel - Beethoven @ 250 - where we featured yesterday the incidental music to King Stephan.

Though he was unfavourably...

Mario Bernardi was a national figure who played a seminal role in the life of classical music in Canada. He was born in Kirkland Lake, Ont. in 1930, not a hotbed of classical music in the early years...

For the text of the War Requiem, Britten interspersed the Latin Mass for the Dead with nine poems written by Wilfred Owen, a World War I footsoldier who was killed a week before the Armistice. Owen...

Most of our daily podcasts in November recall montages honoring artists we lost in recent years, and I eanted to bring your attention to this one, dedicated to Carlo Bergonzi, who passed away in...

Today's montage will propose not only some tender moments between flirtatious protagonists, but also some duets for two guys and two gals, but I promise, nothing sinister! In this montage, I tried to...

Although this may sound quite simplistic, we can divide the bulk of Bach’s vocal works
into two great categories: sacred and secular works. Though Bach didn't compose
operas, he did compensate by...

The post that originally accompanied today's share explored the opera phenomenon in the context of accessibility, and the pair of operas composed in the mid-1940s by Menotti are fine examples of this...

Porgy and Bess has been the subject of many so-called “concept albums”, some of which have had snippets shared on past montages over the years. Two seminal concept albums – both from jazz legends...

This week is "Operation Opera" on our daily podcast, and the next two shares this week hover around the 85th anniversary of the first performance of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.

If Porgy is without...

Note to all - this week on my daily podcast, I am featuring "Operation Opera", a series of five musical shares dedicated to opera, opera music and a few complete operas. This post discusses the first...

Bruckner knew he might not live to complete his ninth symphony and suggested his Te Deum be played at the end of the concert. The presence in the sketches of the figuration heard in quarter-notes at...

Going through my past posts, I discovered that this nearly 4 year-old musing wasn't shared here. As part of my podcasting channel's choral weekend, time to remedy the situation!

Vaughan Williams...

To mark "Last Night of the Proms", I chose to recycle a podcast we shared here last year.

The musical life of Britain would be different in many ways if it were not for the British choral...

Today's OTF was chosen to commemorate the 19th anniversary of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Hector Berlioz's 1837 Grande Messe des Morts ("Great Mass for the Dead," often referred to as...

A milestone of 20th century musical theatre, The Threepenny Opera rolls on unstoppably into the 21st. In their opera "by and for beggars", Weill and Brecht transformed old-fashioned opera and...

The plot here is more akin to a fairy tale than to a romantic comedy: a noble prince is ordered by the mysterious Queen of the Night to rescue a beautiful princess who has been kidnapped. We are...

As I was going through my notes on past posts, I was surprised to discover I had not shared this particular musing and montage on this forum. I guess this is a nice topic to share as my first...

W on the musical alphabet is for Winterreise (Winter Journey), a song cycle setting 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller to music. It is the second of Schubert's two great song cycles on Müller's poems (with...

This 1952 vintage recording of Verdi's masterpiece features three principals who were widely regarded in the world of Italian opera as the leading exponents of their roles and it seems extremely...

Divine convergence (?) has conspired for a recent poll about Donizetti operas to coincide with my long-planned re-post of my musings on Donizetti's dramma giocoso L'elisir d'amore. Composed in less...