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 disa...
A piece that I have been asked to cover probably a dozen times is Handel's Messiah. It's a piece I love, but a piece that I've never conducted or played, and so therefore I don't know it incredibly...
Mr. Holst, wherever you are, I apologize in advance for what I'm about to say. From my research, I know you resented this fact, but unfortunately, I think it's true. Here it is: despite the large c...
In the 1960s, Leonard Bernstein famously helped to popularize the music of a then relatively obscure composer, Gustav Mahler. His work, as well as the work of other conductors, made Mahler into a c...
Nowadays it's hard to imagine Maurice Ravel as a "bad-boy" revolutionary, a member of a group whose name can be loosely translated as The Hooligans. To most listeners today, Ravel's music is the ve...
Longtime listeners of Sticky Notes know that Shostakovich's 10 symphony was the inaugural piece covered on the show. It's been 8 years(!) since that show, so I've totally re-written the episode and...
There are so many great apocryphal stories in the long history of classical music, from the reason Tchaikovsky wrote his Sixth Symphony to what famous composers supposedly said on their deathbeds, ...
One of my favorite things about having Patreon sponsors is that they often suggest the most fascinating pieces and topics for shows. Adrian, who sponsored a show last year, gave me one of my favori...
The great Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski said this after the premature death of his contemporary Grazyna Bacewicz: "She was born with an incredible wealth of musical talent, which she succeeded...
I had such a wonderful time joining the jazz podcast You'll Hear It! We talked about the meeting of jazz and classical music, a topic I've explored before, but never in this much depth and never wi...
In the mid-1920s, Maurice Ravel wrote a letter to the legendary composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. Boulanger's class was a mecca for composers, both young and old, and musicians from all over the...
There is a special category when it comes to Beethoven; a catalogue that doesn't include complete symphonies, sonatas, concerti, string quartets, etc., but just single movements. This is the catalo...
Beethoven once wrote to his publisher: "What is difficult, is also beautiful, good, great, and so forth. Hence everyone will realize that this is the most lavish praise that can be bestowed, since ...
The 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...
I so enjoyed making this latest episode in my collaboration with G Henle Publishers. I talked with two absolute experts in their fields, Norbert Mülleman and Stefan Knüpfer, all about how to edit ...
Admit it: if you're a fan of classical music—or even just a regular concertgoer—you might have glanced at the title of this episode and done a double take. The Dvořák Violin Concerto? Not the Cello...
It's entirely possible that we would not know the name of Johannes Brahms very well if Brahms hadn't met Joseph Joachim as a very young man. Joachim, who was one of the greatest violinists of all t...
The commission for a new Clarinet Concerto from the great American composer Aaron Copland came from a rather unlikely source: Benny Goodman, the man known as the King of Swing. Goodman was one of t...
Steve Reich, the great American contemporary composer, provided this program note about his work Different Trains: "The idea for the piece came from my childhood. When I was one year old my parents...
Debussy and Ravel are often described as the prototypical musical impressionists. It is often said that the two composers are the closest equivalents to the artistic world of Monet, Renoir, Pisarro...
