Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

In 1806, the 36 year old Beethoven received a commission from the Russian ambassador in Vienna, Count Andreas Razumovsky. Razumovsky wanted a set of string quartets for what would soon be his house string quartet which included some of the finest players Vienna had to offer. As part of his commission, Razumovsky asked Beethoven to include a Russian theme in each one of the quartets. Beethoven obli...

I've mentioned Ethel Smyth a few times in the past on this show. This is partly because of her music, and partly because she remains one of the most interesting people who ever lived. She was a composer of course, but she was also a conductor and an author, as well as a political activist. Specifically, she was a suffragette, fiercely advocating for the rights of women to vote in her home country...

When you think of the genre of the concerto, you might be thinking of something like this: virtuoso fireworks, perhaps over romantic gestures designed simply to show the soloist off, and a rather pedestrian orchestral part, giving the soloist all of the spotlight while the conductor and orchestra are mere accompanists.  Of course, this is a huge generalization and it isn't true about many concerto...

We're back! Welcome to Season 10! Leonard Bernstein to his wife: "These days have flown so -- I don't sleep much; I work every -- literally every -- second (since I'm doing four jobs on this show -- composing, lyric-writing, orchestrating and rehearsing the cast). It's murder, but I'm excited. It may be something extraordinary. We're having our first run thru for PEOPLE on Friday -- Please may the...

I had the great joy to do my first ever live edition of Sticky Notes last month with the Aalborg Symphony in Denmark. For this concert, I chose a piece that is extremely close to my heart, Dvorak's New World Symphony. The story of the New World Symphony is a fascinating one. The symphony was the result of an extraordinary series of events, with Dvorak coming to America in 1892, meeting the great s...

Throughout the history of Western Classical Music, folk music has imprinted itself as an invaluable resource for composers from all over the world. In fact, it's easier to make a list of composers who never used folk music in their compositions than it is to make a list of the composers who did! This tradition began long before the 20th century, but the work of composers like Bartok and a resurgen...

In January of 1839, Clara Wieck, Robert's future wife, wrote to Robert, "Don't take it amiss if I tell you that I've been seized by the desire to encourage you to write for orchestra. Your imagination and your spirit are too great for the weak piano." Clara knew that she would have struck a nerve with Robert, whose history with the piano was full of trials and tribulations. Robert had trained as a...

Brahms' violin concerto is one of the most difficult works for any violinist to tackle. It is as virtuosic as the hardest piece of Paganini as well as being as musically complex as a Brahms symphony. It takes most violinists years or even decades to feel comfortable with this piece, and many violinists consider it a kind of Mount Everest. Why? What makes this piece so complex, and yet so beautiful...

Today is a bit of an unusual episode. Last month I was invited by the British Society of Aesthetics to address their annual conference. My task was to give a lecture on whatever topic I wanted, having to do with music. So, considering it was an Academic Philosophy conference, I chose the easiest and most straightforward topic possible - What Does Music Mean?  Obviously, this is a topic that has be...

On October 29th, 1931, The Rochester Philharmonic presented the world premiere of a new symphony by the composer William Grant Still. A symphonic premiere is always something to look out for in musical history, but this one had an even greater significance. The premiere of Wiliam Grant Still's First Symphony, subtitled   "Afro American," was the first time a symphony written by a Black American co...

This is another episode where I highly recommend listening to Part 1 from last week before listening to this episode! It was a great honor to speak with the critic and cultural historian Jeremy Eichler about his remarkable new book "Time's Echo." In today's episode, we speak about Richard Strauss' Metamorphosen, as well as the complicated and hotly debated questions about Strauss' activities durin...

I had the great pleasure and honor this week(and next week) to speak with the author of the new book Time's Echo Jeremy Eichler. The book chronicles four composers and their varied reactions to World War II and the Holocaust, including Schoenberg, Strauss, Shostakovich, and Britten. This week we talked about the historical symbiosis between Germans and German Jews, the concept of Bildung, a centra...

If you haven't listened to Part 1 of this episode about Mahler's 4th symphony, I highly recommend doing that, as every movement of this symphony builds to the "Heavenly Life" of the last movement. On Part 2, we'll be going through the 3rd and 4th movements. Mahler told his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner that the 3rd movement of the symphony was created by "a vision of a tombstone on which was carved...

After the truly heavenly slow movement of Mahler's 4th symphony, a soprano emerges and sings a song literally called "The Heavenly Life." It is a symphonic ending like no other, one that leaves the listener peaceful and contented after taking a long(but not as long as usual) and winding journey with Gustav Mahler and his 4th symphony. The 4th symphony is a symphony of moments, like the famous slei...

If you joined me last week, you heard about the severe intestinal illness that Beethoven suffered from during the year of 1825.  Beethoven thought that he was near death; he was spitting up blood, in terrible pain, and regularly begged his doctor for help.  Ensconced in Baden, a Viennese suburb known for its nature and calm, Beethoven slowly and miraculously recovered from the illness, giving him...

I had long hesitated to write a show about any of Beethoven's late string quartets.  These are pieces that professional quartets spend the better part of their careers grappling with, struggling with, failing with, and much more rarely, succeeding with.  They are some of the most extraordinary pieces of art ever conceived of.  5 quartets, Opus 127, Opus 130, Opus 131, Opus 132, and Opus 135, all w...

At the top of the score for the Danish composer Carl Nielsen's 4th symphony, he wrote: "Music is life, and like it, inextinguishable." This could easily be the shortest podcast I've ever done. I could leave you with that quote and then play you the beginning of the symphony, and you would understand everything Nielsen wanted to portray in this remarkable music. But don't worry, I won't do that. Ca...

The stories, legends, and myths about the trials and travails of composers lives are legion, like Beethoven's battles against fate, Mozart and Schubert's struggles with finances, Brahms' failures with women, Mahler's troubles with just about everyone, and Shostakovich's near fatal interactions with the government.  These stories tend to add to the general understanding of these composers, and in f...

Elgar's Cello Concerto was composed in the shadow of World War 1. It was a piece that marked a profound shift in Elgar's outlook on life and music, and was his last major work before a long silence caused by the death of his wife Alice. It is a piece of remarkable passion for a composer like Elgar, and never fails to move the audience with its combination of grief, melancholy, nostalgia, rage, but...

The "love theme" from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture is one of the most famous themes in the history of Western Classical Music.  The story it accompanies might be the most famous Western play ever written.   Just like Eine Kleine Nachtmusik seems to define the powdered wig era of classical music to the general public, the passionate theme from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet seems...

Very few cities have had a relationship with a single person, especially a foreigner, like the city of Prague and its love affair with Mozart. Here's what Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist for some of his greatest operas, said about it: "It is not easy to convey an adequate conception of the enthusiasm of the Bohemians for [Mozart's] music. The pieces which were admired least of all in other c...

Thank you to Nicole for sponsoring today's show on Patreon! Have you ever heard of Jean-Louis Duport? I imagine that unless you are a professional cellist, or someone who studied cello as a child, you probably haven't. Even though my sister is a professional cellist, I had never heard of him before I was asked to make this show. Duport is a historical figure who has been almost completely forgotte...

When we listen to the music of Johannes Brahms, we often are reminded of the image of the portly bearded Brahms at the piano, eyes closed in a soulful pose. Brahms' works always, even in his youth, seemed to have a burnished maturity about them. As I've said many times on this show, Brahms' music is often described as autumnal, and there's a good reason for this, as its gentle melancholy is one of...

There's a joke among classical musicians that the only parts of a piece that matter are the beginning, the end, and one place in the middle.  I don't think its something that anyone really believes in, but the value of the beginning of a piece in setting the scene cannot be ignored, and the absolutely stunning opening of the Sibelius violin concerto is no exception.  A soft carpet of violins slowl...

Maurice Ravel the Magician, the Swiss Watchmaker, the aloof, the elegant, the precise, the soulful, the childlike, the naive, the warm, the radical, the progressive. These are all words that were used to describe a man of elegant contradictions throughout his life and into today. I talked a lot about Ravel's skill with orchestration last week when we discussed Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibitio...