Klaus Döring's Classical Music/Klaus Döring's Klassische Musik

Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein.  Picture: Netflix By Sophia Alexandra Hall @sophiassocials   Bradley Cooper and British actress, Carey Mulligan, star in the new Netflix biopic about the legendary American conductor and composer, Leonard Bernstein.  Directed by and starring Bradley Cooper as the maestro himself, the film is set to hit Netflix in 2023. Alongside Cooper is Carey Mulligan who plays the conductor’s wife, stage and TV actor Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein. Fans of the streaming service have had an exclusive first look at Cooper and Mulligan in their biopic roles with images released on Netflix’s social media pages yesterday afternoon. Here are the first stills of Cooper and Mulligan from the upcoming Netflix production portraying the ‘American classical music wonder boy’ and his star actress wife.... Carey Mulligan as Felicia Cohn Montealegre and Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein.  Picture: Netflix Born on 28 August 1918, Leonard Bernstein marrie...

Alberto Cartuccia Cingolani, aged 5, is an Italian piano prodigy.  Picture: Simone Cartuccia By Sophia Alexandra Hall @sophiassocials   Alberto Cartuccia Cingolani, a five-year-old Italian pianist, has gone viral for his prodigious performance of Mozart at a music competition in Italy, earlier this month. Having only started learning the instrument in 2020, the five-year-old is already a multi-award winning musician. Cingolani has taken part in seven competitions so far in his early, but unquestionably promising, career, and placed first in each of them. Two weeks ago, Cingolani entered his eighth competition; the 10th International Musical Competition in the Italian town of Penne. The young star opened the competition with a captivating performance of the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major impressing the in-person audience, and online viewers alike. Watch his mesmerising musical delivery below. Like Mozart, Cingolani is from a musical fam...

  Joaquín Rodrigo and Victoria Kamhi Arditti “The Light of my Eyes” by Georg Predota , Interlude Joaquín Rodrigo and Victoria Kamhi Arditti On 14 March 1928 a concert honoring Manuel de Falla’s admittance to the French Légion d’Honneur took place in Paris. Falla insisted that music by some of his young Spanish colleagues should be heard as well, and Joaquin Rodrigo stole the show. A reviewer reports, “At that concert we admired both the spectacular piano performance of Joaquín Rodrigo (who lost his sight due to a grave childhood disease) and the dazzling way in which he composes for the piano.” Rodrigo’s compositions quickly attracted the attention of a number of eminent Spanish pianists, among them  José Iturbi ,  Joaquín Nín  and  Ricardo Viñes . As it happened, Viñes was teaching Spanish piano repertoire to an exceptionally talented pianist from Istanbul.  Victoria Kamhi Arditti  was the daughter of Sephardic Jewish parents belonging ...

 “The only love affair I have ever had was with music. ” Maurice Ravel The history of classical music, however, is full of fabulously gifted individuals with slightly more earthy ambitions. Love stories of classical composers are frequently retold within a romanticized narrative of sugarcoated fairy tales. To be sure, happily-ever-after stories do on rare occasions take place, but it is much more likely that classical romances lead to some rather unhappy endings. Johannes Brahms had an overriding fear of commitment, Claude Debussy drove his wife into an attempt at suicide, Francis Poulenc severely struggled with his sexual identity, and Percy Grainger was heavily into whips and bondage. And that’s only the beginning! The love life of classical composers will sometimes make you weep, or alternately shout out with joy or anguish. You might even cringe with embarrassment as we try to go beyond the usual headlines and niceties to discover the psychological makeup and the societal and c...

Frederick Delius, in full Frederick Theodore Albert Delius, (born January 29, 1862, Bradford, Yorkshire, England—died June 10, 1934, Grez-sur-Loing, France), composer, one of the most distinctive figures in the revival of English music at the end of the 19th century. The son of a German manufacturer who had become a naturalized British subject in 1860, Delius was educated at Bradford Grammar School and the International College, Isleworth, London. After working as a traveler for his father’s firm, he went in 1884 to Florida, U.S., as an orange planter and devoted his spare time to musical study. In 1886 he left Florida for Leipzig and there underwent a more or less regular musical training and became a friend of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. Two years later he went to live in Paris, and from 1897 he made his home at Grez-sur-Loing (Seine-et-Marne), near Paris, with the painter Jelka Rosen, whom he married in 1903. Some songs, an orchestral suite (Florida), and an opera (Irmelin)...

by Maureen Buja , Interlude Frederick Delius:  Summer Night on the River  and  A Song Before Sunrise Frederick Delius (1907) Two works written in close proximity give us two different times of day.  Frederick Delius  (1862-1934) was a quiet master of the tone poem.  Summer Night on the River  (1912) is part 2 of his  Two Pieces for Small Orchestra  (part 1 is  On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring ) and conveys us to a quiet night scene. The river flows by, with occasional leaves or flowers, on the sound of woodwinds. In its quietness and need for dynamic shading, it’s regarded as one of the most difficult of Delius’ scores to perform. His tone painting is done at a whisper, with small colours appearing in the shadows to the side and just catching your ear as they disappear. It takes all the colours of the day and begins to dilute them. The matching piece,  A Song Before Sunrise , was written in 1918. From the beginning, with his ma...

by Maureen Buja   , Interlude Robert Schumann, lithograph by Josef Kriehuber, 1839 Written about children, but not written for children, the collection of short piano pieces entitled  Kinderszenen  (Scenes from Childhood) by Robert Schumann was a gift to Clara Wieck in 1838, two years before they were finally married. The final 13 pieces were chosen from a set of 30 pieces, the remaining 18 published later in Op. 99 and Op. 124. Originally,  Kinderszenen , Op. 15 was to be published together with the 8  Noveletten , Op. 21, as a work called  Kindergeschichten  (Children’s Tales) but Schmann changed his mind and separated them. In a 1838 letter to Clara when he sent her the pieces, Robert wrote that they were an answer to her comment ‘that sometimes I seemed to you like a child….’ He told her to laugh at the titles but to take their performance seriously: ‘They will amuse you, but you will have to forget yourself as a virtuoso.’ Clara Wieck at the ...