Mahlerman celebrates one of the most important years in musical history, when three great composers entered the world... In this post we looked at 1934 and discovered that within a few short months of each other, three great British composers slipped off the coil; a bad year by any measure. Today we journey ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Mahlerman
Is serious music a man's game? Not necessarily, says Mahlerman... Back in 2006 Nicholas Kenyon, then Controller BBC Proms, received an unmerciful kicking in the press and elsewhere for not including a single work by a woman in that season's programmes. And even when the compositions of women do appear, they ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman gives us the four great compers of Das Lied: "a Teutonic soundworld to which few non-German singers posses a passport"... In early 19th Century Germany, ownership of the universal domestic pianoforte expanded from Royalty and the landowning super-rich to embrace the new middle-classes; and in parallel with this expansion ... Read More...
Mahlerman explores the idea that music can be a balance between order and freedom, control and intuition, between the Apollonian and the Dionysian... What is important for the lucid ordering of the work - for its crystallisation - is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist ... Read More...
From Bach to Bob Dylan, Mahlerman shares four of his 'magic moments' in music - those sublime instants when the hairs on the back of your neck stand to attention. What are yours?... Two words that go together as naturally as 'Edward' and 'Sophie', or 'waste' and 'space', are the two words 'magic' and ... Read More...
Mahlerman ponders the effects - or non-effects - of age upon four great composers... The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. I ... Read More...
Fiendish complexity and classical supergroups this week, as Mahlerman treats us to some concertos for multiple soloists... Back in November of 2012 ("Ooh, you are awful…but I like you") our own Philip Wilkinson suggested a post 'on concertos with multiple soloists' - and I duly stored the suggestion in what still ... Read More...
Music snobs used to look down on the supreme melodist Tchaikovsky. More fool them, says Mahlerman... More than fifty years ago, when I stopped keeping spit in a bottle and began to find pictures of native African girls in National Geographic arousing, I also became aware in my fevered wanderings that the ... Read More...
2015 marks the 150th birthdays of two great Scandinavian composers. The concert halls will accordingly be awash with the more famous works of Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen, but today Mahlerman treats us to some of their less well-known gems... The year 1865 turned out to be quite an important one ... Read More...
Is it possible to capture the essence of a place in a piece of music? Mahlerman examines some composers who tried... In the early years of the 19th Century (certainly not before) the idea that the essence of a region or country, the weight of its social institutions and its most ... Read More...
