Bela Bartok News

The Monterey Symphony is now selling subscriptions for its 63rd season, which will offer a fantastic opportunity to hear great symphonic music right here in Monterey County.

Although it's a record on which three adventurous London musicians each contribute to making the earth move, Blink may one day be best remembered as the album with which pianist Alcyona Mick started getting ...

What is it about music that gives it the ability to trigger emotions within us? Sitting with my daughter Ellie while waiting for Friday night's Syracuse Symphony Orchestra concert to begin, I was feeling pretty ...

“I want to do things along the lines of portraiture and fashion spreads”

Featuring Kristina Jacinth, winner of the Young Artist Competition 8 p.m. Friday First Church of the Nazarene 3700 E. Sierra Madre Blvd. via San Gabriel Valley Tribune

“Saludos Amigos (1942)/Three Caballeros”

Cal Performances announces 2008-09 season Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic Robert Cole has packed the 2008-09 season of Cal Performances: the last one in his 23-year tenure as the program's director: with ... via San Francisco Chronicle

“There's a hidden moral trajectory to the piece which I'm hoping can be unlocked with powerful results, as dancers, puppets and screenwork interact with the one solo child on stage”

There are no lions and tigers and bears at the Berkeley Opera's latest offering, a double-bill program of Maurice Ravel's "L'Enfant et les Sortileges" and Bela Bartok's "Bluebeard's Castle," opening Saturday. via SFGate

"Rat Creek, Wood - Tikchik State Park" From Robert Glenn Ketchum's Bristol Bay Southwest series 1999. via Free Times

I don't get it. The State Symphony Orchestra of Russia under the direction of Mark Gorenstein gave a performance that at one point in the program was greeted with an immediate standing ovation and cheers, but ... via HeraldTribune.com

Violinist Karen Gomyo takes the stage at Saturday night's Huntsville Symphony Orchestra concert in the VBC. via Everything Alabama

Fritz Reiner . The music of Richard Strauss and Bela Bartok was especially significant to Reiner. via Chicago Tribune

After the hostile reception to his 1960 masterpiece Peeping Tom , Michael Powell was virtually banished from English cinema, and most of his remaining oeuvre is a scattered assortment of TV commissions and ... via Chicago Reader Online

“It is the most galvanizing piece Bartok wrote”

In 1943 the composer Bela Bartok was in a hospital, ill, broke and despairing.

He had fled his beloved Hungary for America in 1940 to escape the Nazis. But commissions to write music did not come, a teaching post dried up, and Bartok felt neglected.

Then into Bartok's hospital room walked Serge Koussevitzky, the celebrated conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who plopped down a check for $1,000 and asked Bartok to write a new piece.

The assignment gave Bartok a new lease on life, and the result was Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra -- which the Wichita Symphony Orchestra will play Saturday and Feb. 17. Concerto for Orchestra was an instant hit when it was premiered by Koussevitzky in Boston in 1944. Read more

“The passionate intensity of the Blochs' translation, its richly sonorous language and strong supple rhythms, clearly invited a musical setting”

He was 50. Jorge Liderman A native of Argentina and the grandson of European immigrants, Liderman began playing and writing music when he was just a child. via UC Berkeley NewsCenter

Possessing a tight sound that cuts through the rest of the band, saxophonist Dick de Graaf spins lines and ideas with abandon on Moving Target . via All About Jazz

“We will now go into the drawing room and hear Percy destroy my Steinway grand piano.”

Many composers' personal lives find their way into compositions. Where they experience periods of great joy or sadness, their music usually flowers and in many cases becomes their most popular work. via Beacon News

Although some listeners may be partial to Bela Bartok's "Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra" or Alban Berg's Piano Sonata, no composer in history created a more profound Opus No. via New York Sun