"A musical mystery. Sir Edward Elgar's 'Enigma Variations' have confounded music scholars and music fans since its premiere. Elgar tells us that the theme is never actually played during the piece. So ...

The question of when to applaud in a classical music performance can be a source of anxiety for first-time visitors to a concert hall, but the matter can also be a source of levity. Such would at ...

But the theme, 20 short variations and coda bulge with so much rhythmic and coloristic appeal that it's hard to imagine the music seemed so forbidding at its premiere. Ax gave Copland's explosion of ...

Chinese pianist Lang Lang went from being just one more fresh-faced and precocious teenaged phenomenon twenty years ago with his debut recording on Telarc, Lang Lang (2001), featuring the heady ...

What makes Bach's Goldberg Variations tick? Pianist Jeremy Denk has a few ideas. From the comfort of his living room piano, he reveals how Bach's musical DNA — a simple strand of bass notes — is ...

It seemed a simple request. In 1819, an Italian music publisher named Anton Diabelli asked Ludwig van Beethoven to be among the composers who would write a variation on a simple little 50-second waltz ...

Little Gania Borodin had a favor to ask of her famous father: Could she play a duet with him on the piano? Russian Composer Alexander Borodin beamed—it was news to him that his little girl could play ...

Emanuel Ax plays Andante with Variations in F Minor, Haydn, at the piano as part of the Cliburn Concerts Tuesday FORT WORTH — Emanuel Ax has never been one of those cult pianists like, say, Martha ...