Giacomo Facco was a new name to me until only recently. He was a violinist and composer born near Venice who lived from 1676-1753, and his career experienced tremendous highs and lows of success and fame. In 1962 at Vizcain Library in Mexico City, composer, conductor, and musicologist Uberto Zanolli rediscovered Giacomo Facco, who was […]

International Guitar Month continues with Beautiful Music by Johann Sebastian Bach played by guitarist Ana Vidovic. The Croatian musician was a child prodigy who started playing guitar at age 5, gave her first public performance at 7, and began performing internationally at age 11. She eventually came to the U.S. to study with Manuel Barrueco

To continue our observance of Poetry Month, this is poetry by an early woman — Christine de Pizan — set to music by Gilles Binchois. Christine de Pizan was born in Venice in 1364 and educated at the University of Bologna. She wrote poetry and prose, and was the first female professional writer of the

Dr. Gohar Manvelyan is a choral conductor and pianist. Born in Armenia, she was still a little girl when her exceptional musical talents became obvious. When she was 10, her family moved to Russia, where she studied piano and organ at the Myaskovsky music school. She then double majored in piano and choral conducting at

Happy Easter!   Today’s Beautiful Music features the marvelous conductor Emmanuelle Haïm, an acclaimed keyboard player with expertise in baroque music, leading the Berlin Philharmonic in some selections from an October 31, 2014 performance of George Frideric Handel’s oratorio THE RESURRECTION. The soloists are soprano Christiane Karg and contralto Sonia Prina.       (73)

April is International Guitar Month, so today’s Beautiful Music features the outstanding talent of guitarist Xuefei Yang. The Beijing-born musician graduated of Beijing’s Central Conservatoire of Music, and received full scholarship for postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Her collaborations range from performing with some of the world’s great orchestras to

April is National Poetry Month, so today’s Beautiful Music is a poetic treat: Antonio Vivaldi’s FOUR SEASONS Concertos, with a reading by the superb actor Patrick Stewart reading the sonnets that accompany each movement of the Concertos.     (71) Spring Has Come – YouTube National Poetry Month | Academy of American Poets    

Today’s Beautiful Music celebrates a multi-generational musical legacy. Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber (1644-1704) was a Bohemian-Austrian composer and violinist. Born in the small Bohemian town of Wartenberg,Biber eventually settled in Salzburg, where he stayed for the rest of his life and where he composed his most famous works – the SONATAS ON THE MYSTERIES