The Orgelbüchlein Project is a collective composition project aiming to complete Bach's unfinished manuscript known as 'Orgelbüchlein'. In the 'Little Organ Book', Bach laid out a complete hymnal of short organ chorale, 164 in all, but only completed 46 of them. Why the remaining 118 were left as blank pages, with only a title at the head, remains a mystery, but they inspired organists William Whi…

Brahms had already announced his ?retirement? from composition when in the spring of 1894 he played chamber music with the cellist Robert Hausmann and the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld. This encounter apparently renewed his enthusiasm for Mühlfeld?s much admired playing and inspired him to write two clarinet sonatas in the summer of the same year. Brahms and Mühlfeld premiered the works and played…

Il est difficile de décrire la transformation qui a eu lieu dans ce sourire, homme sympathique, penché sur sa guitare et se lance, corps semblait-il, dans sa musique. Le blues a possédé comme un 'verité secouant froid' et le public en haleine vu l'incarnation même du blues que, la tête rejetée en arrière, il a crié et gémi les paroles inquiétantes et fouetté la guitare, faisant claquer les cordes …

Par HALL ALEX. Suitable to be sung as an Evensong anthem, this is a very simple and practical setting for Keyboard and Voice - which might be a solo soprano or treble, or unison - of a Victorian children's hymn that can still be found in numerous contemporary collections. Its flowing, unforced melody is an ideal counterpart to Sabine Baring-Gould 's words which, like the poems of Robert Louis Stev…

Par TIPPETT MICHAEL SIR. Like Robert Schumann who often favoured the horn, Sir Michael Tippett who died on 8 January 1998 makes full use of the instrument‘s tonal possibilities in this work. He translated the Romantic genre of horn quartet into a modern tonal language: 'All movements contain characteristic calls and triad arpeggios. Sometimes the call itself is the theme, as in the fugue. Sometime…

While he was still in Bonn, perhaps in 1792 the year he departed for Vienna, Beethoven wrote this Duo for Violin and Violoncello. We do not know whether he ever completed his work as only the beginning of a fast sonata movement has survived. It is on a page in a collection of sketch leaves that is today known as the 'Kafka Miscellany?. Robert D. Levin has completed this fragment in the same style …

Par SCHUMANN CLARA. Clara Schumann (née Wieck) was undoubtedly the most important female pianist of the 19th century. As a young child she toured Europe as a prodigy: her entire career as a celebrated piano virtuoso spanned more than 60 years. Equally important, but less well known, is the composer Clara Schumann, who published her Opus 1 at the age of eleven. Despite the domestic duties expected …

Ravel's 'Valses nobles et sentimentales? created a stir when they were anonymously premiered in Paris's Société nationale indépendante in 1911: many listeners thought they were by Satie, or even Kodály!For our new Urtext edition of this work, the famed musicologist Nicolas Southon, a co-editor of the 'oeuvres Complètes de Gabriel Fauré?, has examined a large body of sources to present a musical te…

En 1955, alors qu'en train de travailler sur une version musicale de Candide de Voltaire avec le dramaturge américain distingué Lillian Hellman, Leonard Bernstein compose choeurs français et le Latin comme musique de scène pour la pièce The Lark adapté par Miss Hellman de la version française originale par Jean Anouilh. Puisque le drame était sur le procès de Jeanne d'Arc, la musique -s Bernstein …