Ramon van Engelenhoven - Korngold: A portrait for piano (2024) Hi-Res

It must have been some seven years ago that I first discovered the music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1857-1957) and I remember feeling absolutely overjoyed. I immediately felt an incredible connection to his music and it was honestly a sensation that I could only remember from discovering classical music in my early childhood. It more or less shocked me though that this had happened through my interest in symphonic film music rather than the classical music world that surrounded me, where at the time he seemed to be hardly known.

As I am writing this in 2024 I am reminded of how classical music is seemingly not unsusceptible to trends, despite the fact that we sometimes like to pretend otherwise. Not too long ago, I spoke about Korngold with a colleague of about my age. He referred to him as a ‘well-known classical composer’ and I was frankly quite taken aback by it. That things have been different in the past is quite an understatement, and it is thanks to a tough battle that has been fought by so many advocates over the last decades that we finally get to play (and hear!) his music again.