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A loosely sorted and lightly annotated catalogue of through the music posts on this blog.

Claude Debussy was born on today (August 22) in 1862! Happy birthday to the master! The Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra (L.73) was composed in 1889–90 and never performed in Debussy’s lifetime. When a Paris concert was arranged and he learned that only the first movement would be played, he pulled the parts from the stands before the rehearsal began. He would rather the piece not be heard than heard incompletely. It wasn’t premiered until 1919, a year after his death. ...

The Economists has an podcast episode discussing grocery price inflation (up 25–30% globally since 2020). Who’s to blame for rising food prices? Money Talks | Business https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2026/08/20/whos-to-blame-for-rising-food-prices?utm_campaign=shared_article An easy way to understand it, I think, is to trace down step by step on the supply chain. TLDR: cost drives up price. No one seems to be making more money: Consumer facing supermarket chains’ operating margins remain thin (1–4%), markets are highly competitive. Because wholesale costs to grocers went up alongside retail prices, supermarkets are largely passing costs through rather than driving the price hikes. Labor and logistic expenses are higher: labor shortages in food processing, packaging, and long-haul refrigerated trucking have forced companies to raise wages and shipping rates, creating a lot of cost pressure. Farmer’s input costs (fertilizer, energy, seeds, and equipment) spiked due to global events and inflation. And since commodity markets are controlled by a few dominant processors, farmers have been unable to pass along higher costs, shrinking their margins to historical lows (under 15 cents of every food dollar reaches the farmer). Besides, extreme weather events, droughts, and disease outbreaks disrupt key crop and livestock yields. The Vegetable Basket in China The biggest trauma in Chinese history books always reads like “drought, flood, femine, death, empire fall”. There’s a term in Chinese 民以食为天 (food is first priority in people’s life). ...

In 1874, Mussorgsky wrote a piano suite in memory of his friend Viktor Hartmann — a painter and architect who had died suddenly at thirty-nine. The suite moves through ten of Hartmann’s works like a walk through a memorial exhibition, connected by a recurring Promenade theme that is Mussorgsky himself, moving from picture to picture. A gnome. A medieval castle. Children quarreling in a Paris market. An oxcart so heavy the wheels barely turn. A witch’s hut. And finally, the great gate of Kiev — massive, monumental, the brass building until the hall shakes. ...

Yes, it’s another ballet, and we’re listening to the suite. Deal with it. The Firebird (1910) was Stravinsky’s first commission for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes — and his breakthrough. He was twenty-seven. The ballet draws on Russian folklore: the Firebird, a magical creature of light, helps Prince Ivan defeat the immortal demon Kashchei by revealing the secret of his deathless soul. Stravinsky’s teacher was Rimsky-Korsakov, and it shows in the brilliant orchestration and Russian folk material woven in with care. But it already goes further than anything Rimsky-Korsakov wrote. The Infernal Dance is violent in a way that points directly toward what came next: Petrushka in 1911, then The Rite of Spring in 1913 — until he finally blew up the concert hall. ...

There is a recent documentary on Perlman that is worth watching for one reason in particular: the discussion of color and vibrato. Perlman describes vibrato not as an ornament or a habit but as a palette — different speeds and widths produce different colors, and a violinist who only has one vibrato is like a painter with one brush. A narrow, slow vibrato pulls the sound inward and dark. A wide, fast one opens it up. The choice is not decorative; it is the interpretation. ...

Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962) was the violinist everyone loved — an Austrian with a warm, slightly improvisatory tone, an easy stage presence, and a gift for writing short pieces that sounded like they had always existed. Liebesleid, Liebesfreud, Schön Rosmarin, Caprice Viennois — you know them even if you don’t know you know them. He was also responsible for one of the great hoaxes in classical music: for years he published these pieces under the names of obscure Baroque composers — Vivaldi, Couperin, Pugnani — and finally admitted he had written all of them himself: ...

The CSO’s 90th summer residency at Ravinia closes with an all-Tchaikovsky evening — cannons, a soloist finding her footing, and a conductor who once applied here as a cellist.

The Cinderella story long predates Disney — Charles Perrault wrote it in 1697, the Brothers Grimm in 1812, and Rossini turned it into an opera (La Cenerentola) in 1817. Prokofiev was commissioned by the Bolshoi to compose the ballet, and worked on it between 1940 and 1944, through the war years, in something close to exile from the international career he’d built before returning to the Soviet Union. The score premiered at the Bolshoi in 1945. It’s one of the great ballet scores — genuinely romantic in the waltz themes, genuinely funny in the stepsisters (Prokofiev, like Saint-Saëns and Shostakovich, had a taste for musical caricature), and genuinely terrifying in the midnight scene, where the clock strikes twelve and the harmony collapses under Cinderella’s feet. ...

Saint-Saëns wrote three violin concertos, but only the Third (Op. 61, 1880) is taken seriously, and even that is rarely programmed. What survives in the active repertoire are the two shorter showpieces: the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (Op. 28, 1863) and the Havanaise (Op. 83, 1887). Both were written for Pablo de Sarasate, the Spanish violin virtuoso who had a way of inspiring composers to write things that sounded brilliant and felt effortless — then turned out to be extremely difficult. ...