British conductor Daniel Harding is a busy man. As well as just being confirmed as the new director of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, a post he will initially hold alongside his commitments at Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Harding has a second career: as an airline pilot at Air France.
Being such a busy man, it must be challenging to find time to pick repertoire for his next concert. We are glad then to provide a few suggestions that will hopefully inspire him and
anyone else with an interest in flight in all its forms: insect and avian; mythological and man-made.
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It can be played in less than two minutes, wasn’t even written as a conventional concert piece and only acquired its final title almost a decade after the death of the composer who wrote it. Unpublished for fifteen years, the piece existed in a single manuscript copy whose owner retained exclusive performance rights to the work, which he often played while hidden behind a curtain.
Despite its unusual history, Debussy’s Syrinx has gone on to establish itself as probably the most popular piece for unaccompanied woodwind instrument ever written. A key work in the flute repertoire, it’s also hugely popular with clarinet and sax players, and indeed many other performers — search YouTube and you’ll find transcriptions for just about every major instrument ranging from versions for piccolo and guitar to tuba and double bass.
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The music of Frédéric Chopin is a pillar of the piano repertoire, including some of the most brilliant, and challenging, music ever written for the instrument ranging from showy polonaises through to whirlwind scherzos – not to mention his notoriously demanding collection of virtuoso etudes. Unlike the other great piano composers of the 19th century, however, Chopin also composed a surprisingly large number of works which can be tackled even by intermediate players (roughly equivalent to grades 5–6 according the UK’s ABRSM ranking system) – although bear in mind that even Chopin’s “easiest” pieces require plenty of musicality and interpretative finesse to bring off convincingly. We’ve chosen ten of our favourites below, ranked roughly in order from the easiest to most difficult.
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![Luciano Pavarotti, Jose Carreras and Placido Domingo [Source: Wikipedia]](/discover/3_tenors_s.jpg)
January 2023 saw two of the original three tenors, Jose Carreras and Placido Domingo, perform together in Tokyo’s Garden Theatre. The concert was to mark 20 years since the last three tenors concert, held in Columbus, U.S. It was dedicated to the memory of Luciano Pavarotti, who died in 2007.
Given the controversy surrounding Domingo’s career and the age of both singers, the concert was slammed by some for its tackiness.
Perhaps then better to remember the heyday of three tenors mania, when Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti wowed concertgoers with their interpretations of great works from the opera and song literature.
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![Oboe player [Source: Adobe Free Stock Image]](/discover/oboe_2.jpg)
The most intensely lyrical of all woodwind instruments, the oboe has a long and distinguished history. Undisputed king of the woodwind during the baroque era, the instrument features heavily throughout Bach’s works as well as appearing in myriad sonatas and concertos by other composers of the period. The arrival of the clarinet in the late eighteenth century rather nudged the instrument out of the limelight. Mozart turned to the clarinet for his last and greatest wind pieces, rather setting the tone for subsequent composers (Brahms, for example, who wrote some of his finest chamber music for clarinet but nothing whatsoever for oboe), although the 20th-century saw many notable additions to the repertoire, including concertos by Richard Strauss and Vaughan Williams, along with Poulenc’s melancholy late sonata. Continue reading...
The bassoon may be the Cinderella of the woodwind family when it comes to solo works but there’s still a good deal of repertoire out there to explore, including plenty of baroque pieces (Vivaldi, anyone?) and a trio of fine classical concertos by Mozart, Hummel and Weber – while 20th-century works range from Latin-flavoured works by Villa-Lobos and Piazzolla through to Sofia Gubaidulina’s memorably bleak Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings. Continue reading...
![King Charles III and commissioned composer Andrew Lloyd Webber [Source: Wikipedia]](/discover/charles_webber.jpg)
![Portrait of Elizabeth I of England playing the lute, portrait miniature by Nicholas Hilliard, c. 1580 [source: wikipedia]](/discover/Elizabeth_I_Playing_the_Lute.jpg)