Baton Music

The Coronation Mass of March 1779 is said to have been composed for the coronation of an image of the Virgin in the church of Maria Plain near Salzburg, though there is no evidence to support this. In...

Giuseppe Giuseppe Verdi composed his opera Rigoletto in 1851 and together with La Traviata (1853) and Il Trovatore (1853), this opera belongs to the top of Giuseppe Verdi's middle period of composing....

Giuseppe Verdi's Nabucco was first produced in the Teatro alla Scala in 1842. Its triumph was total: the public went mad insisting of an 'encore' of the chorus Va pensiero! that became the second nati...

The aria with chorus Del futuro nel bujo discerno is sung at the very end of the third act of the opera Nabucco just after the famous Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. Zaccaria, a Jewish high priest, encou...

The chorus Che faceste? Dite su! from the opera Macbeth is sung at the very beginning of the opera. Three strings of witches are waiting for the generals Macbeth and Banquo to prophesy their futures:...

The chorus Che faceste? Dite su! from the opera Macbeth is sung at the very beginning of the opera. Three strings of witches are waiting for the generals Macbeth and Banquo to prophesy their futures:...

Alexander Borodin (1833-1887) started working on his only opera Prince Igor in 1869, but at his death 18 years later it remained unfinished.The splendid overture seems to have been completed by Glazun...

The intermezzo is the fifth movement of the original suite of Aram Khachaturian's music to Lope Felix de Vega Carpio's Spanish comedy The Valencian Widow.A somber dramatically opening leads to a slowe...

Ralph Vaughan Williams completed the Five Mystical Songs for baritone, chorus and orchestra in 1911. In the second song I got me Flowers there are incessant changes of time-signature, though the vocal...

Nielsen's Rhapsodic Overture (1927) represents the romantic musical element in orchestral composition. The sub-title A fantasy journey to FaroÙr belies the imaginative character of the piece, which is...

Also sprach Zarathustra!', ('Thus Spoke Zarathustra') is a tone poem by Richard Strauss, composed in 1896 and inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical novel 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra!'. The compo...

Symphony No. 2, known as "Die Auferstehung" ("The Resurrection"), was written between 1888 and 1894, and first performed in 1895 and became one of Mahler's most popular and successful works during his...

Between late 1887 and March 1888 Gustav Mahler composed his 'Symphony No. 1'. In the first version of the symphony there were 5 movements but when the premiere was not well received, Mahler made some...

'Der Rosenkavalier' (The Knight of the Rose or The Rose-Bearer), Op. 59, is a comic opera in three acts by Richard Strauss to an original German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It was first perform...

Mikhail Mikhailovich Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859 - 1935) was a Russian composer, conductor and teacher. His works include operas, orchestral music, chamber music and a large number of songs. His style is s...

For the Danse Macabre, Saint-SaÙns turned to the 'Dance of the Death', which appears in various versions in the Art of the later Middle Ages. Saint-SaÙns evokes (using the xylophone) the midnight cavo...

Georges Bizet composed 'L'Arlésienne' as incidental music to Alphonse Daudet's play of the same name, usually translated as 'The Girl from Arles'. The incidental music has survived and flourished, how...

Georges Bizet composed 'L'Arlésienne' as incidental music to Alphonse Daudet's play of the same name, usually translated as 'The Girl from Arles'. The incidental music has survived and flourished, how...

Andreas van Zoelen (* 1978) is a saxophonist and composer of Dutch/Moravian descent. He studied conducting and saxophone at the Brabants Conservatorium in the Netherlands, with Jean Pennings. He start...

The 'Klipp-Klapp Galopp' ('Click-clack Gallop') is a quick polka by Johann Strauss. The polka was created according to the motifs of the operetta 'Waldmeister' ('Woodruff') and is part of a series of...

In the fall of 1928, Dmitri Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975), completed this arrangement for orchestra, Tahiti Trot. The original music is from a song Tea for Two that Vincent Youmans (1898 - 1946) w...

Giacomo Puccini's opera 'Tosca' might be described as a thriller with political overtones. Set in Rome in 1800 at a time when the Police Chief Scarpia is conducting a reign of terror, it shows its her...

Franz von Suppé composed about 30 operettas and 180 farces, ballets, and other stage works. Although the bulk of Suppé's operas have sunk into relative obscurity, the overtures - particularly 'Dichter...

The English composer Henry Purcell (1659-1695) wrote funeral music that includes his 'Funeral Sentences' and the later 'Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary'. It was first performed at the funeral of Q...

The 'Explosions Polka', opus 43, is written by Johann Strauss in 1847. The title was inspired by a discovery of 'guncotton' or 'nitrocellulose' by German scientist Christian Friedrich Schönbein in 184...