'Composer of the Week' BBC Radio 3 (200 Episodes)

Donald Macleod explores the life and work of composers. Composer Of The Week is one of BBC Radio 3's longest-running series and is broadcast on Radio 3 Monday to Friday at 12 noon. It's a guide to finding out more about composers, and an introduction to exploring their music. This podcast episode is an edited compliation of the entire week's programmes and is published each Friday lunchtime. The podcast is only available within the UK.

International Piano Magazine

Life and Works: SCHUBERT - Naxos Audiobook

The life of Franz Schubert has been a gift to romantically inclined biographers: the beautiful, brilliant, modest boy who sprang to fully fledged genius at the age of 16; the quintessential 'artist in a garret', entirely consumed by his art and living a hand-to-mouth existence in Vienna (home of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven); the gentle, cheerful, convivial young man who prized friendship almost as highly as music itself; the unworldly poet from whom great music poured like water from a fountain; the unrecognised master who died almost penniless at the age of 31. And most of this is true. But as revealed in this dramatised biography (lavishly illustrated with musical examples), there was a secret, darker side to Schubert which only renders his story that much more fascinating.

Life and Works: BEETHOVEN - Naxos Audiobook

For many people, Beethoven is the greatest composer who ever lived. In this portrait-in-sound, actors' readings combine with his music to reveal a titanic personality, both vulnerable and belligerent, comic and tragic, and above all heroic, as he comes to grips with perhaps the greatest disability a musician can suffer. No man's music is more universal, few men's lives are more inspiring. In every sense but one - his modest height - he was a giant.

Complete piano works of Mozart (Various editions in PDF)

Life and Works: HAYDN - Naxos Audiobook

No great composer's story is more predominantly happy than Haydn's, though even his has its share of clouds. A classic rags-to-riches tale, it sees him move from humble beginnings through decades as a liveried servant to his emergence as the most popular and successful composer of his time. One of the healthiest and least neurotic artists in musical history, he did more than any other single figure to pioneer the symphony, the piano sonata and the string quartet - and he was the first truly great practitioner of each. Brilliant, strikingly original and blessed not only with genius but an infectious sense of humour, he was also profound and modest, and his music, copiously illustrated here, has brought happiness and illumination to millions.

Life and Works: MOZART - Naxos Audiobook

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the most astonishing child prodigy in the history of music, is felt by many people to be the greatest composer who ever lived. Dominated and shaped by a highly intelligent but frustrated and ambitious father, his story sees the development of a unique genius, from precocious and often endearing childhood to liberated fulfilment, unexpected poverty, and a tragically early death. Generously illustrated by Mozart's music, from his fifth to his final year, this portrait-in-sound reveals a fascinating yet elusive character, drawing richly on the words of the composer himself and those who knew him.

Life and Works: BACH, J.S. - Naxos Audiobook

Although now beloved and revered by millions as the greatest composer who ever lived, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was best known in his lifetime as an organist, and was eclipsed in fame as a composer by two of his 20 children. For the last 27 years of his life he was a schoolteacher and choir director whose duties extended to meal supervision and dormitory inspection. Yet throughout his career he composed a vast body of music, which is amongst the most joyful, dancing and enrapturing ever written. This portrait-in-sound includes many examples of the music that made him immortal.

Clavier Companion

Musical instruments from the Renaissance to the 19th century - S.Paganelli - 1970

A survey of the evolution of the design and decoration of musical instruments over a period of 400 years