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Malcolm MacDonald on Brahms opus 26

Rehearsals have been going well for this weekend’s performance of my arrangement of the Brahms A major Piano Quartet for orchestra in Guildford. For some reason, the A major has always been the least played of the Brahms Piano Quartets. I’m sure it’s...

RIP Gunther Schuller

  I met Gunther at his wonderful festival at Sandpoint in the 1990’s. On the second night of the festival, I ran into him in the bar and in spite of our vast difference in age, achievement and knowledge, had one of the all-time great bar hangs of my life....

On Orchestrating Brahms’s Opus 26

  The idea for this orchestration of the Brahms Piano Quartet in A Major, opus 26 came to me spontaneously in a flash of inspiration while I was coaching chamber music at the Ischia Chamber Music Festival in 2008. I vividly remember the bright blue sea and...

Charleston: I am aware

I was not aware of what had just happened, but sometimes, it’s better not to know. Today my colleagues (Matthew Sharp, David LePage, Suzanne Casey and Catherine Leech) and I played a noontime recital as part of the English Symphony Orchestra’s Magna Carta 800...