Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

Mahler's 6th Symphony is one of his most complex and ambitious pieces, though it retains a firmly classical structure throughout. It has notorious performance problems such as the order of the middle movements, and the symphony within a symphony final movement. It is also one of Mahler's most emotionally profound pieces, embracing life, death, and the struggles between these two forces. In the first movement, Mahler sets up the stakes for the battles to come and it's this movement we discuss today.

Eric and Colin Jacobsen are co-founders of the The Knights. The orchestra has claimed a spot over the last 10 years as one of the most dynamic and adventurous orchestras in the world. Colin and Eric are some of the most interesting people in classical music and so we talked about a lot of things, including founding an orchestra, what they felt was missing in the classical world, what it means to play chamber music in an orchestra, and of course, the current situation and what it means for the future.

Saint-Saens considered his 3rd symphony his greatest work: “I have given all that I had to give. What I have done I shall never do again.” Later in his life, Saint-Saens would be known as an arch-conservative, but at the time he was writing the Organ symphony, Saint-Saens was enamored with the formal and structural innovations of the music of Liszt. Today we’ll explore the dualism between the piece’s Romantic aspirations and Classical grounding, plus of course, the role of the organ in this Organ Symphony.

I had a chance to sit down with the award winning duo of organist Alcee Chriss and filmmaker Stacey Tenenbaum for a fascinating interview about the organ, competitions and more. We talk about Chriss' experience at the Canadian International Organ Competition, the pressures of performing and whether Jazz works on the organ, and I got a chance to pepper Tenenbaum with some questions on filmmaking, and her process of understanding the organ from the point of view of a total outsider. This is a fun one!

Beethoven’s Triple Concerto might be his most heavily criticized work. Musicians look down on it, critics always complain about it, conductors hate conducting it, orchestral musicians hate playing it, and yet it still gets performed fairly regularly. But I’m here today, thanks to Brooke who sponsored today’s show on Patreon, to say that I think all of this criticism of this much maligned piece is totally unfair. I love the Beethoven Triple Concerto, and I think I can convince you to as well.

John Heiss teaches composition, flute, and music history at the New England Conservatory. I first encountered Mr. Heiss in his legendary Schoenberg/Stravinsky class at NEC and have been an admirer of his ever since. Mr. Heiss spearheaded visits to NEC from composers such as Milhaud, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Lutoslawski, and Ligeti, the subjects of today's conversation. You'll notice I don’t say much - today is like coming to class with a master teacher, an experience I'm so glad to be able to share with you.

Just a glance at a biography of Le Chevalier should have every movie producer salivating. He was the son of a 17 year old slave and her white owner. He was an expert athlete, known as the greatest fencer in all of France. He led a legion of black troops to fight during the French Revolution. On the musical side, he was a virtuoso violinist and wrote some truly wonderful music that is only recently being rediscovered by mainstream institutions. Join Sticky Notes as we explore his remarkable life and music.

First, I want to let my listeners know that Thursday will begin a new commitment to exploring the works of minority composers. It's long past time to begin doing that. For today, please enjoy this thoughtful and deeply entertaining conversation with the great pianist, composer, and writer Stephen Hough. Hough is one of the great pianists of our time and is also a deep thinker about classical music of yesterday and today. I had so much fun with this conversation, recorded about three weeks ago. Enjoy!

1.Please consider donating to the ACLU or any other organization fighting systemic racism. 2.Bartok's 44 Violin Duos are a triumph of Bartok's devotion to the folk music of Eastern Europe. 42 of the 44 are based on field recordings Bartok collected in his travels, many of which you will hear today. The social duoing project, where I played all 44 duos with 44 violinists from around the world, was started as a result of the pandemic, but was also made possible by this forced pause in travel and work. Enjoy!

Jan Swafford was such a fantastic guest last time that I thought we had to have him back on! During these past two weeks, we discussed how so much of the revolutionary music in the history of classical music was influenced by storytelling, whether it was Monteverdi, Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, Debussy, Ives, Stravinsky, or Schoenberg. This week, on Part 2, we discuss the final 4 composers, including one of the most beautiful descriptions of Ives I've ever heard. Don't miss this episode! You won't regret it.

Sibelius' 7th Symphony is a piece that is barely a symphony at all, and yet it carries symphonic logic throughout. It's only 20 minutes long, in one movement that never stops evolving, with a form that has sparked many debates, and with an ending that is as shocking as any in the Western Repertoire. Simply put, it is Sibelius at his best, and so today we’ll take apart this incredibly complex piece, talking about its form, its stunning metric modulations, its inspiration, and of course, its abiding emotion.

Jan Swafford was such a fantastic guest last time that I thought we had to have him back on. This week(and next week), we discussed how so much of the revolutionary music in the history of classical music was influenced by storytelling, whether it was Monteverdi, Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, Debussy, Ives, Stravinsky, or Schoenberg. This week, on Part 1, we discuss the first 4 composers on the list, trying to understand the chicken or the egg question of which came first? The story? Or the revolution?

Respighi occupies a strange place in musical history. He is almost never considered to be one of the “greats,” though his mastery of orchestral color is never doubted by anyone. Today on this Patreon sponsored episode, we’ll look at his Pines of Rome. We’ll talk about Respighi’s extremely detailed program notes, his Strauss like gifts at portraying real life in his music, and the fact that Respighi, for all his innate conservatism, was actually the first composer to use electronic music in one of his works.

Zsolt Bognar is a Renaissance Man. He is a pianist, a writer, a thinker, and the host of Living the Classical Life, an amazing show where Zsolt sits down with some of the leading lights of the classical music world. Today I turned the tables and interviewed him in a wide-ranging conversation that touched on some of our favorite musicians and composers, our experiences wearing many hats in the classical music world, and of course, how we’re dealing with quarantine life. This was a really fun conversation and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

At the end of 1893, Mahler could not find a way to end his 2nd Symphony. But the funeral of Hans Von Bulow, a conductor who Mahler worshipped even though Von Bulow hated Mahler’s music, gave Mahler what he called "the flash that all creative artists wait for." In one of the most sprawling, dramatic, and narratively based movements he would ever write, Mahler embraced a kind of universal humanism that is inspiring to this day. We'll talk about this movement and the radiant Urlicht movement that precedes it.

Today I was thrilled to have with me Matthew Szymanski of the Phoenix Orchestra and Aram Demirjian of the Knoxville Symphony on the show to talk about what classical music as a whole is going to need to do to respond to the current situation with COVID-19. This is a weedsy conversation that digs into streaming, the future, and the sobering realities of audience-free concerts. If you want to hear 3 musicians grappling in real time with this crisis and how we will come out of it, this is the show for you.

Today we explore the two middle movements of Mahler's 2nd symphony. These movements were meant as intermezzi, and are both memories in their own way. The first is a nostalgic, wistful, and extraordinarily simple(for Mahler) Austrian Landler. The second is a bitterly cynical and ironic retelling of a story from Mahler's favorite collection of folk poetry, Des Knaben Wunderhorn(The Boy's Magic Horn). These are the movements listeners sometimes struggle with the most, so let's uncover their secrets together!

We're taking a brief detour from Mahler 2 today to discuss Debussy's legendary Afternoon of a Faun, a piece written in the same year as Mahler's 2nd symphony. It's easy to forget how revolutionary this piece was at the time, but composers from Stravinsky to Schoenberg to Boulez to Messiaen were galvanized by this 10 minute masterpiece which Boulez said "breathed new life into the art of music." This is a piece that changed musical history for good, and today we'll find out exactly why it had such an impact.

“What next? What is life and what is death? Will we live on eternally? Is it all an empty dream or do our life and death have a meaning? We must answer this question, if we are to go on living.” These words form the basis of Mahler's epic second symphony. This week, on Part 1, we'll talk about the first movement of the symphony. We'll explore Mahler's multiple programs for the piece, the structure of this huge movement, and of course, the powerful emotions underpinning every single note Mahler ever wrote.

If you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall for a slightly nerdy conversation between a conductor and a composer who also happens to be a great writer and thinker about classical music, this week's show is for you! This is a wide-ranging, free-flowing conversation that covers the composition process, understanding Beethoven from a composer's perspective, the intimacy of Brahms, and the wackiness and earnestness of the music of Ives. I hope this hour will be as fun an escape for you as it was for me!