The Vienna Philharmonic, founded in 1842, is an orchestra considered to be one of the finest in the world.
Vienna has been an important center of musical innovation. 18th- and 19th-century composers were drawn to the city due to the patronage of the Habsburgs, and made Vienna the European capital of classical music. Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert and Johann Strauss II, among others, were associated with the city, with Schubert being born in Vienna. During the Baroque period, Slavic and Hungarian folk forms influenced Austrian music. Vienna's status began its rise as a cultural center in the early 16th century, and was focused around instruments including the lute.
Kathleen Mary Ferrier, CBE was an English contralto singer who achieved an international reputation as a stage, concert and recording artist, with a repertoire extending from folksong and popular ballads to the classical works of Bach, Brahms, Mahler and Elgar. Her death from cancer, at the height of her fame, was a shock to the musical world and particularly to the general public, which was kept in ignorance of the nature of her illness until after her death.
The Edinburgh International Festival is an annual festival of performing arts in Edinburgh, Scotland, over three weeks in August. By invitation from the Festival Director, the International Festival brings top class performers of music, theatre, opera and dance from around the world to perform. The festival also hosts a series of visual art exhibitions, talks and workshops.
Hans Richter was an Austrian–Hungarian orchestral and operatic conductor.
Dame Isobel Baillie, was a Scottish soprano, popular in opera, oratorio and lieder. She was regarded as one of the 20th century's great oratorio singers.
Louis Philip Kentner was a Hungarian, later British, pianist who excelled in the works of Chopin and Liszt, as well as the Hungarian repertoire.
Annabelle Whitestone, Lady Weidenfeld, (born c. 1946) is an English former concert manager working with classical music impresarios including Ingpen & Williams, Ibbs and Tillett, Wilfrid Van Wyck, The English Bach Festival and Conciertos Daniel in Madrid
Brian Large is a television director and author. He is among the world's foremost TV directors specializing in opera and classical music.
Alfred Schulz-Curtius, also known as Alfred Curtis, was a German-British classical music impresario who was active primarily in continental Europe and the United Kingdom from the 1870s until the 1910s.
Christopher Fifield is an English conductor and classical music historian and musicologist based in London.
The Philharmonia Quartet was an English string quartet musical ensemble founded during the early 1940s out of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, though some of its members had collaborated during the 1930s in earlier ensembles. The formal career of the quartet ended in 1952. It is not to be confused with the Philharmonia Quartet, Berlin, founded by Daniel Strabawa and other members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1985, nor with the Philharmonic Quartet.
The Stratton String Quartet was a well-known British musical ensemble active during the 1930s and 1940s. They were specially associated with the performance of British music, of which they gave numerous premieres, and were a prominent feature in the wartime calendar of concerts at the National Gallery. After the War the group was re-founded as the Aeolian Quartet.
The Virtuoso String Quartet was a British quartet, founded by the Gramophone Company in 1924 to be the first such quartet established specifically for recording. In effect they displaced the Catterall Quartet from their position recording for HMV.
Flora Woodman was a Scottish soprano singer popular for her London concert performances in the first decades of the twentieth century. She extensively performed in oratorios such as The Messiah and Elijah.
Harold Holt was a noted impresario in England from the 1920s to the early 1950s, who managed many of the great names in the classical music world. He was considered the leading concert agent of his time, and was said to be "the greatest raconteur in London, who wasted away his fortune".
Charles William Clark was an American baritone singer and vocalist teacher. He is generally regarded as the first American baritone singer to be famous in Europe, and as one of the greatest baritone singers of all time. He sang to great acclaim at the major opera houses of Europe and America, appearing in a wide variety of roles from the Italian, French and German repertoires that ranged from the lyric to the dramatic.
Founded in 1969 by Jasper Parrott and Terry Harrison, HarrisonParrott Ltd is an international artist and project management agency working in the field of classical music and the arts, based in London, Munich, and Paris.
Jasper Parrott is the co-founder and executive chairman of HarrisonParrott Ltd. Based in London, Munich and Paris, the artist management company is credited with pioneering innovative methods of handling the careers of classical musicians. HarrisonParrott's approach has been widely influential within the artist management business worldwide.
John Baptist Schoeffel, was an American theatre manager and producer, and hotel owner. With Henry E. Abbey he was involved presenting European theatrical stars in the US, including Sarah Bernhardt, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry: and with Maurice Grau he and Abbey managed opera singers as Adelina Patti, Christina Nilsson, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Francesco Tamagno and Fyodor Chaliapin in their tours of opera houses in Boston, Chicago and New York.
