Four for the Fourth

I gave up a long time ago on trying to find much meaning or substance in music for patriotic occasions. We live an age of such small-minded, parochial jingoism that thinking of any music in terms of nationalist celebrations seems only to cheapen the music. This year I...

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...