Tag Archives: Tone Poem Tuesday

Want to listen to one of the great orchestral showpieces of all time? Sure you do! Here’s Rimsky-Korsakov’s Cariccio Espagnol. And you can’t go wrong with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Here’s something interesting, not for how good it is but rather how good it isn’t. This concert overture, creatively titled by its composer “Concert Overture #1,” is a student work that makes for a nice and pleasant listen, but that’s … Continue reading →

Last night we finally watched this year’s New Years From Vienna concert, a new year tradition of mine that dates back to high school when I discovered this wonderful annual program on PBS. We used to watch it on New Years Night, … Continue reading →

Transcriptions of works from one medium to another can be especially fascinating, as this orchestral version of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody #2 demonstrates. This was originally a work for piano, and to perform it well requires enormous skill from the … Continue reading →

Some Berlioz this week, and one of his most frequently performed works: the Roman Carnival overture, which is a concert piece comprised of repurposed material from his opera Benvenuto Cellini. Berlioz is not generally considered one of classical music’s finest … Continue reading →

In hopes that tonight begins a rekindling of the possibility of America.

I’m not sure what’s in the water over at WNED, the local classical music station, but they seem to be on a kick with this piece. I’ve heard it three times in the last two weeks whilst driving to various … Continue reading →

I post this one every year around this time, because it’s spooky and amazing: “The Isle of the Dead” by Sergei Rachmaninov.