When Mr Félix José de Montes y Galloso passed away prematurely, his family (the widow and four children) suffered economic hardship. To try to alleviate the situation, the mother decided something that was not uncommon at the time: to board one of the boys at the seminary. This way, she had one less mouth to feed, while providing the boy an education that went far beyond what she could afford. The eldest son [...]

Sometimes the way a song is interpreted make us to stop and to rediscover it. Because there's something different, we hear details that we didn't previously hear in other versions; sometimes are more obvious, like unusual tempi, and sometimes more intangible: the accent on a word, a colour, the particular way the piano plays a note... And I wanted to talk about this, this week, about a song rediscovered thanks to a different interpretation.

A kind reader asked me a few days ago if we wouldn't have a "Halloween-Lied". Well, I hadn't even think about it, but... why not? We can easily find stories of spirits, ghosts, and creatures from the otherworld in the repertoire. So today we have a horror story.

“Why should the voice always be accompanied by the pianoforte? There seem to me great possibilities in voices and instruments in combination.” Ralph Vaughan Williams said so in 1940, when he had not written songs for many years. It appears that the piano was an instrument he wasn't particularly fond, and by the time he had written most of his songs, before the Great War, he had used other instruments or ensembles to accompany [...]