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March 24

1721 Johann Sebastian Bach dedicated his six Brandenburg’ Concertos to Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg, whose orchestra apparently never performed them.

1784 first performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 15 at the Trattnerhof in Vienna, with the composer as soloist; many pianists consider this to be one of the more difficult of Mozart's concertos.

1868 first performance of the Brahms Piano Quintet Op 34, in Paris; before being published in 1865, the work had undergone at least two transformations, starting as a string quintet and then turning into a Sonata for 2 Pianos (which survives as Op 34b).

1924 first performance of the Sibelius Symphony No. 7 (as ‘Fantasia sinfonica No. 1’) in Stockholm, conducted by the composer, who was unsure what name to give the piece, and only decided it was a symphony after long deliberation.

1928 Byron Janis – American pianist (died March 14, 2024); made a French film on Chopin that was shown around the world.

1930 Cristobal Halffter – Spanish composer (d.2021); the nephew of two other composers, Rodolfo, and Ernesto Halffter.

1932 first performance of Randall Thompson’s Symphony No. 2 by the Rochester Philharmonic, Howard Hanson conducting; the composer’s biographer Donald Francis Urrows says that in this work, Thompson “accomplished two things: he wrote an integrated work of large dimensions along the ‘classical’ model... and he put into his music an element of nationalism.”