Luukas Hiltunen

Italian composer Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945), the son of a baker, wrote his first opera at the age of thirteen. In 1882, aged nineteen, he was admitted to the Milan Conservatory, where he studied for...

For many listeners, the French composer Jules Massenet (1842-1912) is best known for the exquisite Méditation from his opera Thaïs (1894; revised 1898). While the opera itself is now performed only o...

Songs without Words (Lieder ohne Worte) is a series of short lyrical piano pieces composed by Mendelssohn between 1829 and 1845. The compositions were part of the tradition of lyrical short piano piec...

This Concert Fantasy for flute and piano, with optional tambourine, is based on Edvard Grieg's incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Op. 23. Rather than following Peer himself as the central f...

The name of Max Bruch (1838-1920) is associated above all with his Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26, composed in 1866. Standing alongside the great violin concertos of Beethoven, Mendelssohn a...

These arrangements for contralto (or mezzo-soprano) and string quartet of two arias from George Frideric Handel's opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt, 1724) were commissioned by the...