A classical music website dedicated to Pacific Symphony
Did you know music can have a profound and positive effect on your brain? Music shapes the way we think, act, and connect with others. Whether through enhancing cognitive abilities or fostering emotional connections, the impact of music on our
A fun, little Spotify playlist of concertos you don’t run across too often. –TM
The Concerto for Orchestra No. 1, “Naughty Limericks,” by the brilliant Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin (born 1932), composed in 1963. Great fun. Evgeni Svetlanov conducts the USSR Symphony Orchestra.
Here’s one of my favorite concert videos. It features pianist Alexis Weissenberg playing Stravinsky’s Three Movements from Petrushka. The director is Ake Falck, and while he didn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, the lighting and the camerawork here are superb. Notice
The neoclassical Piano Concerto No. 1 by Lukas Foss (1922-2009), recorded by Pacific Symphony, Carl St.Clair, conductor and Jon Nakamatsu, piano. Released 2001. The piece was first written as a clarinet concerto when Foss was 17. He made this version
https://youtu.be/2qCCU5EJM5s Leonard Bernstein conducts the Royal Danish Orchestra in the Symphony No. 3, “Sinfonia Espansiva,” by Carl Nielsen.
The Lyric for Strings by George Walker.
We noticed the new trailer (kind of violent) for “Outlaw King” on Netflix uses a famous classical tune as underscoring. The tune? Albinoni’s Adagio, of course, which probably wasn’t actually composed by Albinoni, but by 20th-century musicologist Remo Giazotto. Here’s
Another Bernstein rarity, this one written for the inaugural season of Mstislav Rostropovich (Slava) as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. There’s a nifty part for electric guitar partway through, and a taped sequence of political
As we approach Leonard Bernstein’s 100th birthday on August 25, I’ve been featuring a number of his lesser-known pieces in this space. Here’s another: The “Elegy for Mippy II” for solo trombone, composed in the late 1940s. Mippy was the