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Latest Listeners’ Club Posts

David Oistrakh Plays Debussy: “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair” August 14, 2026

La fille aux cheveux de lin (“The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”) is the eighth piece in Book I of Claude Debussy’s solo piano Préludes, written around 1910. The title was inspired by an 1852 poem by Leconte de Lisle. We explored this dreamy, ephemeral piece in a previous post. David Oistrakh performed this transcription for violin and piano as […]

Fauré’s Piano Trio in D Minor: A Revelatory Farewell August 12, 2026

The Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 120 is the revelatory penultimate work of Gabriel Fauré. Fauré composed it amid declining health, shortly after his 1920 retirement as director of the Paris Conservatory. Completely deaf and nearly blind, the composer wrote in a poignant letter to his son, “and so one says goodbye, little by little.” The Piano […]

Paul Dukas’ Fanfare from “La Péri”: Prelude to a Mythical Ballet August 10, 2026

Paul Dukas’ 1912 ballet in one act, La Péri, is based on a Persian folktale. Iskender, an aged king, steals the magic Flower of Immortality from the hands of the sleeping Péri, a beautiful winged fairylike creature. Immediately, Iskender is filled with the vitality of youth, and consumed with earthly material desires. He falls in love with […]

Michael Torke’s “Last Year”: Music for Solo Violin and String Orchestra August 7, 2026

Last Year by American composer Michael Torke (b. 1961) suggests the beautiful melancholy of a cold, overcast winter day. The solo violin’s contemplative melody emerges over frigid, unrelenting pizzicati. As the music develops, the concertmaster picks up the melody and enters into a duet with the soloist. To my ears, there are echoes of the […]

Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major, “Turkish”: Isabelle Faust, Bernard Haitink and the Boston Symphony Orchestra August 5, 2026

For Mozart, a virtuoso keyboardist from the age of 5, the violin was a second instrument. Following his teenage years, Mozart largely abandoned performing publicly on the violin to focus on the piano. He composed his 21 mature piano concertos from age 20 to the final year of his life. Still, by all accounts, Mozart played the violin excepti […]

Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2: Dmitry Shishkin with Mischa Damev and the Mariinsky Orchestra August 3, 2026

After hearing the premiere of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, the pianist and composer Sigmond Stojowski remarked that it “began with Bach and ended with Offenbach.” In a previous post, we explored this brilliant and exhilarating work, which shakes up the traditional concerto form with a slow and solemn first movement, […]

Percy Grainger’s “Lincolnshire Posy”: Portraits from the English Countryside July 31, 2026

Lincolnshire Posy, a folk song suite for band by Australian-born composer Percy Grainger (1882-1961), reveals ancient sounds from the English countryside. In 1905, Grainger, who adapted England as his homeland, traveled to remote villages with pencil, notebook, and phonograph in hand. His efforts to preserve the raw, exotic sounds of the is […]