Laura Tunbridge’s Chamber Music: A Very Short Introduction is due in December.
The end of a concert performance is sometimes greeted with a rapturous silence, broken only when the players lower their instruments and the audience begins to applaud. What is probably only a few seconds of held breath can feel like an eternity. At Beare’s Chamber Music Festival last December, this honour was bestowed on Schoenberg’s string sextet, Verklärte Nacht....
Beethoven was everything at once – impatient, brave, long-suffering, petty, short-tempered, honest, generous to his friends, cruel to his family, ductile and intractable, worldly and deeply innocent....
Robert Schumann died in an asylum near Bonn in 1856, having committed himself there two years before, following a suicidal plunge into the Rhine near his home in Düsseldorf. He had had many...
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