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Music Criticism 1900-1950 Organized by: Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, Lucca and the Societat Catalana de Musicologia, Barcelona The second day of discussions concerning Music Criticism from 1900 to 1950 featured still more stimulating papers on a wide range of topics. These included Music Criticism under Italian Fascism, and a particularly intriguing trio of presentations on […]

Barcelona: October 18, 2016 Conference Organized By: Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, Lucca and the Societat Catalana de Musicologia, Barcelona Greetings from Barcelona! This is CT.com Executive Editor David Hurwitz reporting as a participant in the above conference, part of a series devoted to the history of music criticism in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is, […]

There was a time when recording a Beethoven cycle was an enterprise undertaken with the benefit of a lifetime’s familiarity with the music, redolent with the (theoretical) wisdom of—if not old—at least a very mature age. Many of the greatest 20th-century conductors never completed their recorded traversals of all nine symphonies, at least not in […]

Since publishing last year’s “Six Christmas CDs That Always Make the List”, a few more titles either newly released or left out of the original group made their case for inclusion so strongly that I had to add a “Part 2”. So, here are another six Christmas CDs that together with the first set add […]

You read about it regularly in composers’ biographies. Schubert, Donizetti, Schumann, Smetana, Wolf, Joplin, Delius—all were likely victims of syphilis. Other STDs were just as common in ages past. Rossini, for example, suffered from gonorrhea throughout his later life, and was so full of enthusiasm for his urinary catheters that he kept them on display […]