This week I’ll share with you two undeservedly underrated and underrecorded composers that in my not so humble opinion deserve to be overrated and overrecorded. Both lived in the golden age of the late romantic, early modern period of classical music, that is, the late 19th to early 20th century. I want to share with you the Piano Concerto in E minor by Moritz Moszkowski (part 1, part 2 and part 3), German-Jewish composer born in Breslau, Prussia (now Poland). According to that most trusted source, Wikipedia, he was very popular in his day but died in poverty, “sold all his copyrights and invested the whole lot in German, Polish and Russian bonds and securities, which were rendered worthless on the outbreak of the war.” I am not trying to draw parallels between the early 20th century and today, but when he poured his life savings into German government bonds, he probably could not imagine that they would be wiped out – there is a black swan for you!
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