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GRAHAM'S MUSIC

Classical Music Demystified

I'm Graham Abbott, an Australian conductor and music educator. This blog was devised as a sanity-saving project in 2020 when lockdowns meant that I lost a year's work almost overnight. Here I write about classical music and share its inside stories. Most of these stories will be based on scripts which I wrote and presented on "Keys To Music" on ABC Classic between 2003 and 2017. Many thanks to the ABC for permission to use this material.

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The Life and Work of CPE Bach

Part One One of the facts of music history which many of us probably remember is the fact that Johann Sebastian Bach's music fell into...

The Song of the Earth

In the summer of 1906, Gustav Mahler composed his massive eighth symphony, a vast musical canvas requiring hundreds of singers and...

The Couperin Family

Perhaps the most famous musical family in the history of western music is the Bach family. There were musical Bachs (I've counted 77) all...

Richard Strauss: A Life of Drama

Part One This music was written by a man who was 81. It was written in depressing, shattering circumstances at the end of the second...

The Life and Work of Arcangelo Corelli

This music [listen] was written in 1953 by the English composer Sir Michael Tippett in response to a commission from the Edinburgh...

Stravinsky's Symphonies

In modern musical parlance, the word "cycle" is used to denote a complete batch of something. So even though he didn't describe the Ring...

Benjamin Britten: An Overview

The two radio programs on which the following article is based went to air in November 2013 to mark the centenary of Britten's birth. It...

Piano Trio: Part Three

In our last two posts we've been charting the history of the piano trio. In the first instalment we explored the piano trio's origins in...

Piano Trio: Part Two

At the start of the 19th century, chamber music was still regarded as something of a domestic form of music making. Chamber music did...

Piano Trio: Part One

I don't spend anywhere near enough time listening to (or writing about) chamber music. It's been many decades now since I was skilled...

Handel's London Operas: Part Four

I think it’d be fair to say that with one exception, the eight works I’m going to survey in this post document a rather sad tale: the...

Handel's London Operas: Part Three

It seems almost indecent to suggest that opera could be a battleground between vested interests but in early 18th century London this is...

Handel's London Operas: Part Two

This post is the second in a series of four covering the rich legacy of George Frideric Handel's London operas, and we begin with the...

Handel's London Operas: Part One

During my later years with the ABC I had the privilege of indulging my passion for the life and work of Handel on a number of occasions....

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