To coincide with Saint George's day, I'm posting on Tuesday this week. We need a rose for the Liederabend, don't we? This year, our musical rose arrives from Russia.

While translating the Catalan post, I'm not sure that this expression is usually used in English: “things (concerts, singers, movies…) are not just as they used to be”. We use it to joke, express irony, or complain. For example, why do so many current films last more than 200 minutes, when Hitchcock or Lubitsch created masterpieces within 90 minutes?

Here's to Schubert! This would be the headline, after the programme of the 32nd Schubertíada was presented a few hours ago. Here's to Schubert and his sense of friendship! Thanks to this, we are here, two hundred years later, celebrating his music.

The Hollywooder Liederbuch by Hanns Eisler, probably his second best-known work, tells about his escape from Nazi Germany and exile to the United States, and he often does so with the verses of his friend Bertolt Brecht, with whom he shared fate. After the war ended, some exiled German artists and intellectuals returned home, others preferred to stay in the host country; Eisler [...]

Between 1912 and 1914, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his Four Hymns, in three distinct versions: for tenor, viola, and piano; for viola and string orchestra; and for piano and string quartet. They should have been released in September 1914, but the outbreak of the war prevented it, and they were not performed until 1920. All four songs had texts by four different poets [...]