Reaching the end of the concerto-ranking journey (I won't be doing the Baroque), I think my biggest takeaway is a huge surge in appreciation for Mozart. His piano concertos are just a really incredible body of work. I also applied a more analytical eye to Beethoven concertos that I had grown up loving but hadn't... Continue Reading →
This category was always going to be the Beethoven and Mozart show. I listened to some auxiliary composers to keep it fair, but these two masters just absolutely dominated the genre in their time. Mozart's oeuvre can be intimidating. 27 concertos?! Where to start? Never fear. I've done the listening. A lot of this will... Continue Reading →
About this time last year I was finishing up a multi-week exploration of the greatest piano sonatas from each period from Classical to contemporary. This topic may not be as cosmically significant as the Spider Nebula (pictured above), but I think it's worth discussing in the piano community. I always meant to create a landing... Continue Reading →
Years ago, I stumbled on a website where a music lover had made a list of his or her favorite pieces for a variety of moods. That list encompassed all classical genres, and it was pretty comprehensive. Some of the associations led me to discover music that soon became some of my favorite. To show... Continue Reading →
I discovered Mozart’s Fantasia and Fugue in C Major, sometimes titled Prelude and Fugue, while looking for a non-sonata Mozart piece to learn in college (at the time I settled on the C minor Fantasia, K. 396). I’ve wanted to write about this one for a while, but I always had a fundamental problem: I... Continue Reading →
5. Witold Lutoslawski: Variations on a Theme by Paganini https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpU6jOgCoGg Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 might be the most popular theme-and-variation subject of all time. I mean, look at how many composers have done something with it. It does easily lend itself to variation; the predictable harmonic movement by fourths is sort of a blank canvas... Continue Reading →
Hal Leonard Classical Piano Blog 