Music for Life: 100 Works to Carry You Through

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Marais was a viol player at the court of Versailles who wrote music of descriptive strangeness. We’ll keep his The Bladder-Stone Operation for a different dietary occasion. His name came to the fore after he featured in the film Tous les matins du monde (1991), when he was played by Gérard Depardieu. Marais’s music – intimate, deep, pensive – goes round in your head for days. 15 January Ave verum corpus William Byrd

Music for Life by Fiona Maddocks | Waterstones

Robert Nathaniel Dett. Alamy Photograph: Alamy 29 January In the Bottoms: IV. Barcarolle (Morning) Robert Nathaniel DettTwentieth-Century Classical Music: A Ladybird Expert Book. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-1-4059-3241-7.

Fiona Maddocks | The Guardian

Darwent, Charles (29 November 2022). "Tom Phillips obituary". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 6 June 2023.In the US, the composer reinvented himself as a star virtuoso pianist, one of the most highly paid performers in the land. He was featured in fashionable magazines, moved in the same gilded society as Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin (though neither was an intimate; Rachmaninov didn’t fall easily into friendships). Soon after his arrival in New York, in November 1918, amid armistice celebrations, he was mobbed, as one critic noted, by the flapper girls of Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn. They wanted to hear his famous C sharp minor Prelude, a youthful work that became ubiquitous in rag and jazz versions as well as his own solemn, solo piano original, the bells of holy Russia written into its chiming chords. In 1940 Sergei Rachmaninoff, living in exile in America, broke his creative silence and composed a swan song to his Russian homeland. What happened in those final haunted years and how did he come to write his farewell masterpiece, the Symphonic Dances? The popularity of Vivaldi – usually topping the “most played” classical lists thanks to The Four Seasons – risks obscuring the glory of his expansive genius. The Venetian priest-violinist wrote church music, more than 500 concertos and 50 operas. He died in poverty. Try the exuberant Gloria or the haunting Stabat Mater . But start with this ravishing love aria from his opera Giustino. 19 January Bagatelle Op 33, No 5 Ludwig van Beethoven