Back in 2008, the British journalist Jasper Rees wrote a charming book called (in the U.S.) “A Devil to Play,” the funny story about his quest to play a Mozart concerto on the French horn — an instrument officially known these days simply as “horn,” with the Parisian taint removed. Those of us who’ve played […]

Here’s an interesting piece of research, courtesy of the University of Miami’s Carlos Abril, who directs the undergraduate music education department at the college. In a study just published in the “Journal of Research in Music Education,” Abril and co-author Kenneth Elpus of the University of Maryland found that, as of 2004, about 21 percent […]

Contemporary classical composers have a higher profile these days than they did not long ago, which marks something of a return to an older time when the names of living composers were as well-known as performers. One musician who’s helped raise public awareness about contemporary classical composition is John Corigliano, whose score for “The Red […]

Once again, Seraphic Fire has set the world of iTunes on its ear, climbing up into the top 10 on the Apple music service’s classical charts earlier this month with its newest disc, just as it did last year with its record of the Monteverdi “Vespers of 1610.” This year, it’s the Hausmusik version of […]

Looking ahead again to the coming season, the Miami Bach Society will have an impressive gathering of early music performers paying us a visit. A visit or two, if you’re talking about Jordi Savall (pictured above), the Catalan master of the viol who came to wider prominence with his work on Alain Corneau’s 1991 film […]

It’s hard to imagine today’s opera companies without the music of Giacomo Puccini, and indeed it’s likely that many an opera company might not be here today were it not for the box-office reliability of the Italian composer’s work. Puccini’s life was relatively long if tragically abbreviated — he died in 1924 at age 65 […]