Mahlerman guides you through the development of serious music in Spain... After a turbulent history of invasion and occupation by Romans, Visigoths and Moors (British pensioners don't count - yet) it is perhaps not surprising that by the time the nineteenth century rolled around, Spain was one of the most backward ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Mahlerman
This week Mahlerman leads us into the spooky world of Bela Bartok... A glance at the photograph of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok gives a clue perhaps to the tensions, at times almost unbearable, that we find in much of his music. Reading his touching letters, as I have been, it ... Read More...
As we approach the anniversary of the death of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Mahlerman pays tribute to the great lyric baritone, who provided 'the soundtrack to my life'... In so many ways the aristocratic lyric baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who died in Berg, Bavaria almost a year ago, was the quintessential Berliner, a genuine ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman introduces some of the great music that emerged from the chaos of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia... Few will argue that the 19th Century became a Golden Age for Russian Literature, and similarly it was not until around the 1860's, after the death of the so-called father of ... Read More...
Mahlerman offers a feast of great music for Easter Sunday... On this day last year seasoned Dabblers may remember that we travelled east, to the bleak wastes of Russia, and found Easter nourishment in the company of Sergei Rachmaninoff and his musical father Tchaikovsky. This year we discover inspiring music closer ... Read More...
Bach and Mozart loved the instrument, so why has the viola always languished in the shadows?... Yes, there they are right under the nose of the conductor in the front-middle of a modern symphony orchestra, perhaps four or five desks of two; and yes, that soft-edged, dark-hued baritonal sound does indeed ... Read More...
This week, Mahlerman takes us back the 16th and 17th centuries and the sound of the Baroque... When the Renaissance Period in music, which began in the early 1400's, rolled over into the Baroque two hundred years later, the difference between what a composer wrote down, and what a performer played, ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman takes us on a journey into "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 emerged just ... Read More...
With the Grammy Awards imminent, Mahlerman casts his eye over the nominees and identifies the gems amid the dross... Next Sunday at the Staples Center in Los Angeles the Rapper LL Cool J will host the 55th Grammy Awards, the annual bean feast set-up in 1959 by the National Academy of ... Read More...
Mahlerman gives us a tour d'horizon of the serious music scene in 2013, and he pulls no punches... Or is it just dying, very slowly, and the priest is on the way? Writing this in the shadow of the closure, after more than 90 years, of the HMV music chain (following ... Read More...
