Classical Composers History

Probably the most naturally gifted musician the world has ever known, Mozart began his career early as a child prodigy. By the age of five, he was already proficient in the violin, the harpsichord, and piano keyboard. He had also begun composing music that had integrity. Ludwig van Beethoven is a crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in classical music. Beethoven displayed his musical talents at an early age. Listen to the full biographies of these two musicians, from the beginning to the end!

In 1959, Nancy’s life changes dramatically when her family moves to a new town, Stevenage. Now there is room for a piano, Nancy loses herself in an imagined past of Mozart’s lesser known sister, while making unexpected discoveries of her own inscrutable mother’s history. In 1989 the piano becomes a fixture in a women’s community centre in the town, in a time of personal strife for Martha and her friends. The politics of the era threaten the existence of the centre, and the future of this group of women. A troubled young man buys the piano in 1997 and places it in his sparse flat at ...

Ed Le Brocq invites you on a journey through a living tradition that spans millennia – the tradition of Western classical music. With Ed, you will roam its magnificently bendy path, from the Mesopotamians to the mediaeval age to music composed just last week by Australia's most creative minds. You will discover how notes from the Indus Valley influenced the development of scales by Pythagoras and his mates in Ancient Greece, finding their way through the Romans into church music of the Middle Ages, and why some of those notes were banned.

At thirteen years old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who had captured the hearts of northern Europe, but his father Leopold was now determined to conquer Italy. Together, they made three visits there the last when Mozart was seventeen, all vividly recounted here by acclaimed conductor Jane Glover. Father and son travelled from the theatres and concert salons of Milan to the church-filled streets of Rome to Naples, poorer and more dangerous than the prosperous north, and to Venice, the carnivelesque birthplace of public opera.