Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

Have you ever been to an art museum and wished that you had music to accompany your experience?  Music that made the art you were looking at more vivid, more immediate, and more emotionally intense?  Well, Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is the piece for you.  Inspired by his late friend Victor Hartmann's paintings and designs, Mussorgsky composed a series of 10 miniature pieces for...

Welcome to episode number 200 of Sticky Notes!! On December 22nd, 1808, a day that would live in classical music lore forever, Ludwig Van Beethoven sat down for his very last appearance as a solo pianist to play this new piano concerto, his 4th. This performance was not only the premiere of the new piano concerto, but the premiere of two new symphonies as well, the 5th and the 6th. It featured man...

What did Dmitri Shostakovich intend to portray in his music? There is probably no more debated a question in all of 20th century Western Classica lMusic than this one. On the surface, it seems to have an easy answer. Shostakovich portrayed his own thoughts and feelings in his music, just as any other composer would. And that is certainly true. Shostakovich, above anything else, was truly one of th...

Have you ever wondered what it is that us conductors are really doing up there? Are we just waving our arms in time to the music? What role does the conductor actually play in a concert? How about a rehearsal? Do we also learn to be train conductors as well? Well, today's episode is about answering those questions! We'll talk about conducting on 3 different levels, including the basic level where...

Marc-André Hamelin is one of the world's greatest living pianists. He is known as a virtuoso of the highest order and has made nearly 100 recordings spanning the gamut of the piano repertoire. In this conversation we talk about how Marc fell in love with Gershwin, piano rolls, Busoni, Godowsky, the nature of virutosity, Haydn, CPE Bach, programming, nerves on stage, and much much more! This was su...

"This is Fate, the force of destiny, which ever prevents our pursuit of happiness from reaching its goal, which jealously stands watch lest our peace and well-being be full and cloudless, which hangs like the sword of Damocles over our heads and constantly, ceaselessly poisons our souls." With this description, Tchaikovsky gave his patron Nadezhda von Meck a rare insight into the inspiration behin...

Last week we covered moments 1-15 in my top 25 favorite moments in classical music, going all the way up towards the end of the 19th century. This week we're going to explore 9 of my favorite moments from the wide world of 20th century music, and then, in a little twist, I'm going to look at 5 of my favorite moments from living composers. We're going to hear from Stravinsky, Mahler, Dawson, Barber...

What MAKES a moment in a piece of classical music? Sometimes it's the result of careful pacing from a composer, the slow build to a powerful release. Sometimes it's about surprise, a sudden explosion, or even a sudden extinguishing of sound. Sometimes it's about a harmonic transition, where the music lifts off the ground or is brought down to earth. Sometimes it's the culmination of over an hour o...

From 1825-1827, Mendelssohn wrote 3 of his most beloved and most played works: his Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, his String Quartet, Op. 13, and the piece were going to talk about today, his Octet. What is truly astonishing about these three pieces is that they were all written before Mendelssohn turned 18 years old. Mendelssohn was the greatest prodigy in the history of Western Classical Musi...

I left you last week after Part 1 of Mahler's 5th symphony, dazed and defeated.  There seems to be no hope, and no way out.  But as many of you know by now, Mahler reaches for the entire emotional spectrum in his music, and what Mahler builds out of the ashes of the first two movements is a complicated, difficult, and fascinating Part II, and a warm, sunny, and loving Part III.  Part II is a singl...

There is a thread of musical theory called Schenkerian analysis, based on the work of Heinrich Schenker.  Schenker believed that musical works could be boiled down to their fundamental structures and harmonies.  Entire works could be described with single chords.  If Schenker had applied his analysis to Mahler's 5th symphony, he might have played just two chords for you: a C# minor chord, and then...

I'm not sure there's ever been a composer who changed as much throughout his or her life as Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg would become famous, or infamous, depending on who you talk to, for his invention of atonality; the equalization of all keys so that the system of harmony that had been followed, in one way or another, in Western music for nearly a thousand years, was banished.   This invention...

Have you ever wondered what exactly goes on behind the scenes putting together an opera? Have you ever asked yourself how a director make decisions on how to interpret the libretto of an opera? Why do some productions look so completely different to others? What is "regie theater" and why it is so controversial? Well, all of these questions and more are answered by my guest today, the fantastic di...

Clara Schumann, without a doubt, was one of the greatest pianists of all time.  Schumann's playing didn't just leave critics and audiences in raptures, it also left other composers amazed that their music could sound so beautiful. Liszt called her the Priestess of the Piano, Chopin adored her playing, and Mendelssohn brought her over and over again to Leipzig to play concerts with the Gewandhaus o...

Stefan Dohr is one of the greatest french horn players in the world today. He has been the Principal Horn of the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the world's greatest orchestras, since 1993. In this really fun interview, Stefan and I talked about how he switched to the horn after starting out on the viola, his most memorable performances, what's it like to actually play in the Berlin Philharmonic, how...

Brahms was only 20 years old when Robert Schumann wrote his famous Neue Bahnen(New Paths) article that proclaimed Brahms as the future of music and the heir of Beethoven. Beethoven had only been dead for 26 years at this point, and his shadow still loomed large over every single composer living in Germany, and beyond. Brahms knew that the most concrete way he would be compared with Beethoven would...

Just one year before Debussy wrote his legendary Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, he completed another groundbreaking work.  It was a string quartet, which he expected to be the first of many. But in the end, it would be the only one he would ever write. If you aren't familiar with Debussy's music, this quartet might be the perfect place to start. In the string quartet, Debussy mastered for the...

Martin Fröst very well may be the greatest living clarinetist. His brilliant sound, feats of virtuosity, eclectic taste, and amazing performing ability has made him a superstar in the classical music world. I recently worked with Martin in Spain and a month later we had time to sit down and record a conversation at his home in Stockholm. This was a fascinating and wide ranging conversation talking...

By as early as 1909, composers like Mahler knew that tonality was reaching its breaking point, and composers like Debussy were experimenting with colors and ideas a composer like Brahms wouldn't have dreamed were possible.  Strauss was shocking the world in his own right with his erotic and disturbing opera Salome. Mirroring the roiling tensions all over the world, music was pushing and stretching...

The most famous thing about Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is the riot that took place at its premiere.  Perhaps its overcompensating for classical music's reputation for being a bit stuffy, but musicians and musicologists LOVE talking about the riot at the Rite of Spring, and I'm no exception.  But you might be surprised to know that the Rite Riot was by no means the only disturbance at a class...

If you listened to my show last week about Stravinsky's ballet The Firebird, you know that Stravinsky's life was never the same after the premiere of the ballet in 1910. Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes and Stravinsky's greatest collaborator, said just before the premiere, "this man is on the eve of celebrity." Diaghilev was absolutely right, as The Firebird made Stravinsky a Pa...

In 1906, the impresario Sergei Diaghilev created a sensation in Paris with an exhibition of Russian Art. This was the first time a major showing of Russian art had appeared in Paris, and from this point forward, the city was obsessed with Russian art, literature, and music.  Diaghilev, ever the promoter, then put together the Ballets Russes, the Russian Ballet, in 1909, a company based in Paris th...

This February, I have the great honor of joining the Indianapolis Symphony for the North American premiere of Pavel Haas' remarkable unfinished symphony. Pavel Haas, a Czech Jewish composer, wrote the existing music for his symphony between 1940 and 1941 before his deportation to the Terezin ghetto/concentration camp. He was a full participant in the well known cultural activities of the camp, but...

Ask a non-classical music fan to name a piece of classical music. If they don't say Beethoven 5, or the Ode to Joy, they probably will say The Four Seasons. They might not know that it was written by Vivaldi, but the Four Seasons are a set of pieces that have made that leap into popular culture in a way that almost no other classical composition has. The Four Seasons have been remixed, reimagined,...

You might be thinking, "Why on earth would anyone want to devote an entire podcast to etudes?" For most instrumentalists, etudes are the bane of our existence. They are studies, meant to develop technique on an instrument. Etudes are an essential part of any instrumentalists work, but they had never been known for their musical content. As a violinist, I had practiced dozens of etudes by Kreutzer,...