Schubert: Die Schöne Mullerin Mini-Episode No. 1 (Free Preview)
Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast
This is a free preview of my new series of mini-episodes over on Patreon all about Schubert's Die Schöne Mullerin, one of the great masterpieces of the 19th century. Each week we'll explore one song from the cycle, in a series of 21 episodes! Come join us over on Patreon.com/stickynotespodcast and thanks for listening!
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Wagner: Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde w/Case Scaglione
Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast
This is a continuation of my new series where I learn about a new piece from a great friend/musician. This week I'm thrilled to welcome Case Scaglione, the Music Director of the Orchestre National D'Ile de France, for a discussion of the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. This is one of the most beloved pieces in the entire repertoire, and my longtime skepticism of Wagner has always kept me away. But Case has such a beautiful way of talking about Wagner that I might very well be convinced to give it another shot! This is a really fun and also philosophical episode - I hope...
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Lili Boulanger: Psalm 130
Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast
The story of Lili Boulanger's life is one of the most fascinating and tragic in all of musical history. A remarkably precocious talent, Boulanger learned to read sheet music before the alphabet, played the violin, piano, cello, and harp, and composed regularly from a young age. Despite her talent and commitment, Boulanger suffered from chronic illness her entire life, which severely dampened her budding career and prevented her from reaching her potential. She died at the age of just 24, likely from Crohn's disease, and left behind several spectacular pieces that unfortunately were soon...
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Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 (Part 2)
Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast
In a letter to Tchaikovsky's nephew Vladimir Davydov, Tchaikovsky wrote: "I'm very pleased with its content, but dissatisfied, or rather not completely satisfied, with the instrumentation. For some reason it's not coming out as I intended. It would be typical and unsurprising if this symphony were torn to pieces or little appreciated, as that wouldn't be the first time such a thing had happened. But I absolutely consider it to be the best, and in particular the most sincere, of all my creations. I love it as I have never loved any of my other musical offspring." I'm returning to that word...
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Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 (Part 1)
Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast
The great and somewhat controversial conductor Leopold Stokowski said this about Tchaikovsky: "His musical utterance comes directly from the heart and is a spontaneous expression of his innermost feeling. It is as sincere as if it were written with his blood." I couldn't agree more with Stokowski, because I think he hits on a word that has made Tchaikovsky's music so powerful to almost every audience that encounters it: sincere. Tchaikovsky's music is so profoundly moving because you feel as if there is no gap between the music and Tchaikovsky's emotions. It's as if he is earnestly speaking...
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Beethoven String Quartet, Op. 59, No.2
Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast
I'm always tickled by composer trivia questions, like which standard canon works begin in a major key and end in a minor key? I'll give you one, but please comment others below: Mendelssohn's 4th Symphony. Well, how about this one: how many of Beethoven's 16 string quartets end in a minor key? The answer? Just one, Op. 59, No. 2, the subject of today's show. And that minor key is hugely important to this darkest of the three Op. 59 quartets, three towering achievements that changed the string quartet repertoire for good. Beethoven, as I've said many times on the show, was a revolutionary...
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Brahms Symphony No. 2 LIVE w/ The Aalborg Symphony
Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast
Brahms spent much of his adult life battling with his ambition to write the next great symphony and his terror at the shadow of Beethoven standing behind him. Brahms tortured himself for 14 years with his first symphony, and only published it when he was 49 years old. But when that symphony finally came out, it was a relative success for a new work, and with immense relief, Brahms quickly turned out another symphony in just 4 months. Brahms' first symphony was quickly dubbed “Beethoven’s 10th” something that annoyed Brahms to no end. When told that the main theme of the last...
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Zemlinsky: The Mermaid
Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast
The story of Alexander von Zemlinsky’s The Mermaid begins with a passionate love affair and ends in heartbreak of the most unabashedly big-R Romantic kind. In 1900, the young, fabulously talented, and famously beautiful Alma Schindler came to Zemlinsky’s home to study composition. Wildly passionate feelings soon developed between them, and Alma wrote the following in her diary: “I would gladly be pregnant for him, gladly bear his children. His blood and mine, commingled: my beauty with his intellect. I would gladly serve him in his professional life, live for him and his kith and kin,...
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Pergolesi Stabat Mater
Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast
Many aspects of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s life seem relatively normal when it comes to composers of the Baroque era. He was prolific, died young, and his music became very famous only after his death. However, all three of these facts are complicated by the unique circumstances of Pergolesi’s life. He was somewhat prolific, but dozens of pieces that were once attributed to him are no longer considered authentic, including much of the music that Igor Stravinsky made famous in his ballet Pulcinella. Pergolesi did not just die young; he died remarkably young, at the age of twenty-six,...
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Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2
Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast
We humans seem to love comeback stories, and there is no comeback quite as compelling in the classical music world as Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. It was written three years after the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony, a premiere so catastrophic that it lives on in the annals of musical history, and is the essential starting point for understanding the Second Piano Concerto and how it came to be. The concerto revived both Rachmaninoff’s career and his spirits, and it remains his most famous orchestral work. It is a towering masterpiece of Romanticism, overflowing with...
info_outlineThe collaboration between Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht is rightly legendary. The two men could not have been more different from each other, and like the Brahms/Joachim relationship I mentioned in my recent show about the Brahms Double concerto, the friendship between Weill and Brecht was stormy to say the least. The two collaborated on some of the most memorable works of the Weimar era in Germany, such as the Threepenny Opera, which features a pretty famous tune called Mack the Knife.
Their final collaboration was on the “sung ballet” The Seven Deadly Sins. This is a piece that was written at a point of remarkably high tension within Weimar Germany. On an artistic level, the 1920s and early 1930s had seen a veritable explosion in the world of culture, with art, dance, theater, and music all featuring artists who were pushing the boundaries with wild experimentation and a kind of ecstatic fervor that produced some of the world’s greatest and most memorable cultural achievements. On a parallel track however, the rise of the Nazis cast a pall over all of this. By 1933, both Brecht and Weill(who was Jewish) knew that Germany was not a place that they could stay safely. Weill ended up in Paris and then in the US for the rest of his life, while Brecht bounced around Europe before returning to East Germany after the war, hoping to be a part of the Marxist Utopia that he believed had been founded there. The simmering combination of Weill’s mastery of transforming popular forms into a unique kind of classical music along with Brecht’s pointed satire and brilliantly inventive libretti resulted in the Seven Deadly Sins, a piece that that brutally satirizes extreme capitalism and the degradation of the human soul that supposedly results from it. This is a nakedly political piece, and I should make it clear that by talking about it, by choosing to feature it on the show, and by regularly performing it, I don’t necessarily endorse its views. Brecht was extreme in all ways, as we’ll get to today, and the power of this piece in my opinion doesn’t come from its politics, but from its remarkable and devastating portrayal of a human soul and the tragedies that can befall it. This is one of my favorite pieces of the whole 20th century, and I’m so happy to share it with you today. Join us!