jacquesdupuis:

Some composers’ names sound like their music.

From the archives: Yuja Wang’s days as a Wunderkind. Here she is, playing Chopin’s Op. 42 Waltz in A-flat major.

Stephen Hough goes film noire with Chopin for the Telegraph. 

Ireneusz Jagla plays Chopin’s Prelude in G major, Op. 28, no.  3. What’s special about this recording? It’s played on the Pleyel piano Chopin used while at the monastery in Valldemossa in Mallorca, Spain.

Henryk Górecki’s mesmerizing Symphony No. 3. A test of patience and listening endurance, but a surefire pay-off when it’s all said and done.

Maurizio Pollini plays the first of Schönberg’s Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11. These can be considered the first pieces in which Schönberg abandoned tonality, or simply (more in line with his own opinion) the continuation of what had come before in late Romantic writing. Certainly some of the gestures give credence to that thought.

Thanks, Rachmaninoff. Not everyone’s hands reach a 13th like yours.

Congratulations to the 2013 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Music: Caroline Shaw! 

Emanuel Ax plays Brahms’s first Piano Concerto in d minor, Op. 15, a piece with a lot to offer and a strikingly similar sound to the composer’s symphonies.