This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
Sir William Turner Walton, OM was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera. His best-known works include Façade, the cantata Belshazzar's Feast, the Viola Concerto, the First Symphony, and the British coronation anthems Crown Imperial and Orb and Sceptre.
John Martin was an English Romantic painter, engraver and illustrator. He was celebrated for his typically vast and melodramatic paintings of religious subjects and fantastic compositions, populated with minute figures placed in imposing landscapes. Martin's paintings, and the prints made from them, enjoyed great success with the general public—in 1821 Thomas Lawrence referred to him as "the most popular painter of his day"—but were lambasted by John Ruskin and other critics.
Nightwatching is a 2007 film about the artist Rembrandt and the creation of his painting The Night Watch. The film is directed by Peter Greenaway and stars Martin Freeman as Rembrandt, with Eva Birthistle as his wife Saskia van Uylenburg, Jodhi May as his lover Geertje Dircx, and Emily Holmes as his other lover Hendrickje Stoffels. Reinier van Brummelen is the director of photography. James Willcock, known for his esoteric sets, is the art director.
Autos sacramentales are a form of dramatic literature which is unique to Spain, though in some respects similar in character to the old Morality plays of England.
The Symphony No. 3 in C major, Op. 52, by Jean Sibelius is a symphony in three movements composed in 1907. Coming between the romantic intensity of Sibelius's first two symphonies and the more austere complexity of his later symphonies, it is a good-natured, triumphal, and deceptively simple-sounding piece. The symphony's first performance was given by the Helsinki Philharmonic Society, conducted by the composer, on 25 September 1907. In the same concert, his suite from the incidental music to Belshazzar's Feast, Op. 51, was also performed for the first time.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was a Dutch draughtsman, painter and printmaker. An innovative and prolific master in three media, he is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art and the most important in Dutch art history. Unlike most Dutch masters of the 17th century, Rembrandt's works depict a wide range of style and subject matter, from portraits and self-portraits to landscapes, genre scenes, allegorical and historical scenes, biblical and mythological themes as well as animal studies. His contributions to art came in a period of great wealth and cultural achievement that historians call the Dutch Golden Age, when Dutch art, although in many ways antithetical to the Baroque style that dominated Europe, was extremely prolific and innovative, and gave rise to important new genres. Like many artists of the Dutch Golden Age, such as Jan Vermeer of Delft, Rembrandt was also an avid art collector and dealer.
The Symphony No. 1 in B♭ minor is one of two symphonies by the English composer William Walton. The composer had difficulty in completing the work, and its first public performance was given without the finale, in 1934. The complete four-movement work was premiered the following year.
Intimations of Immortality, Op. 29, an ode for tenor, chorus, and orchestra, is one of the best-known works by English composer Gerald Finzi. It is a setting of nine of the eleven stanzas of William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", cast as a single continuous movement of 45 minutes duration. Finzi began composing the work in the late 1930s, but did not complete it until 1950, just before it was performed on 5 September at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester Cathedral, with Eric Greene as soloist and Herbert Sumsion conducting.
The painting Ahasveros and Haman at the Feast of Esther is one of the few works of Rembrandt van Rijn whose complete provenance is known. The origin of the painting can be traced back to 1662, two years after its completion.
Lilli Katriina Paasikivi-Ilves is a Finnish mezzo-soprano. She has been the artistic director of the Finnish National Opera since 1 August 2013.
The Handel Society of New York (HSNY) was a New York City based musical organization that presented concert and semi-staged performances of operas and oratorios by George Frideric Handel from 1966-1974. The group mainly performed out of Carnegie Hall and was responsible for presenting the American and New York premieres of several works by Handel. The ensemble was also the first to record many of these works; releasing several LPs for RCA and Westminster Records.
Paul Sartin is an English singer, instrumentalist, composer and arranger, specialising in oboe and violin. He is best known for his work with the folk band Bellowhead, but also plays with three-piece Faustus and the folk/comedy duo Belshazzar's Feast.
In music, Op. 51 stands for Opus number 51. Some compositions assigned this number:
Belshazzar, son of the last king of the Neo-Babylonian empire Nabonidus, has inspired many works of art and cultural allusions, often with a religious motif. While a historical figure, depictions and portrayals of him are most often based on his appearance in the biblical story of Belshazzar's feast in the Book of Daniel. This story is the origin of the idiomatic expression "the writing is on the wall".
