This Week in Classical Music: July 28, 2025. Catching up (yet again). This week isunusually fruitless: of the composers, there’s only Hans Rott, who was talented and mad, and died young. He wrote music that, in some ways, out-Mahlered the early Mahler. Rott was born in Vienna on August 1st of 1858, two years before Mahler, and died in a mental hospital at the age of 25 (as Robert Schumann did 28 years earlier, and Hugo Wolf would, 19 years later). We believe Rott had tremendous talent (Mahler thought he was “a musician of genius”), and who knows how much he could’ve created had he been healthy – as it was, Rott composed for just six years, from the age of 16 to 22, after which things went downhill. You can read more about Rott in our earlier entry and listen to the 3rd, probably the most “Mahlerian,” movement of his Symphony in E Major, subtitled Frisch und lebhaft (Fresh and lively) here. Paavo Järvi conducts the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.
By coincidence, this week there were few performers and conductors as well. To compensate for this paucity, we’ll turn back to the previous week, which at the time we dedicated to the New York Times and the deterioration of musical culture in our country. While we were commenting on woke philistines and the general decline of classical music, we missed several anniversaries, especially those of interpreters, pianists and singers in particular. So here we go.
July 23rd was the birthday of two pianists and one singer: Leon Fleisher and Maria João Pires, and Susan Graham. Leon Fleisher, who was born in San Francisco in 1928, was one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century (his performance of both Brahms’ piano concertos, with the Cleveland Orchestra and George Szell, was superlative). He established himself in the early 1950s and had a very successful career till 1964, when his right hand stopped working because of a neurological condition called focal dystonia. Undeterred, Fleisher switched to a left-hand repertoire, such as Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand and Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 4. Fleisher returned to his regular repertoire in 2004, after 40 years of medical treatment. He was also a great teacher (André Watts, Yefim Bronfman, and Hélène Grimaud were among his many students).
Maria João Pires just turned 82, and she still performs. Born in Lisbon, she studied in Portugal and Germany. She launched her international career rather later, in the 1980s. Not being fond of a career as a star, she took long pauses between performance seasons, sometimes disappearing for years, as she did between 1978 and 1982. Pires’s Mozart is great, as is her Chopin, but of course, her repertoire is much broader than that: she also made wonderful recordings of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann.
Susan Graham is 65, which is hard to believe; she’s one of the best mezzo-sopranos America has ever produced. Her Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro and Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia are pure delight.
Isaac Stern was born on July 21st of 1920, 105 years ago. He was not just a great violinist; he was a cultural figure, the likes of which we greatly miss these days.
We should also mention two conductors: Igor Markevitch, who was also a composer. Born on July 27th of 1912, in Kiev, then the Russian Empire, he spent most of his life in France and Italy. Finally, Riccardo Muti turns 84 today.
Catching up, July 2025
This Week in Classical Music: July 28, 2025. Catching up (yet again). This week is unusually fruitless: of the composers, there’s only Hans Rott, who was talented and mad, and died young.
He wrote music that, in some ways, out-Mahlered the early Mahler. Rott was born in Vienna on August 1st of 1858, two years before Mahler, and died in a mental hospital at the age of 25 (as Robert Schumann did 28 years earlier, and Hugo Wolf would, 19 years later). We believe Rott had tremendous talent (Mahler thought he was “a musician of genius”), and who knows how much he could’ve created had he been healthy – as it was, Rott composed for just six years, from the age of 16 to 22, after which things went downhill. You can read more about Rott in our earlier entry and listen to the 3rd, probably the most “Mahlerian,” movement of his Symphony in E Major, subtitled Frisch und lebhaft (Fresh and lively) here. Paavo Järvi conducts the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.
By coincidence, this week there were few performers and conductors as well. To compensate for this paucity, we’ll turn back to the previous week, which at the time we dedicated to the New York Times and the deterioration of musical culture in our country. While we were commenting on woke philistines and the general decline of classical music, we missed several anniversaries, especially those of interpreters, pianists and singers in particular. So here we go.
July 23rd was the birthday of two pianists and one singer: Leon Fleisher and Maria João Pires, and Susan Graham. Leon Fleisher, who was born in San Francisco in 1928, was one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century (his performance of both Brahms’ piano concertos, with the Cleveland Orchestra and George Szell, was superlative). He established himself in the early 1950s and had a very successful career till 1964, when his right hand stopped working because of a neurological condition called focal dystonia. Undeterred, Fleisher switched to a left-hand repertoire, such as Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand and Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 4. Fleisher returned to his regular repertoire in 2004, after 40 years of medical treatment. He was also a great teacher (André Watts, Yefim Bronfman, and Hélène Grimaud were among his many students).
Maria João Pires just turned 82, and she still performs. Born in Lisbon, she studied in Portugal and Germany. She launched her international career rather later, in the 1980s. Not being fond of a career as a star, she took long pauses between performance seasons, sometimes disappearing for years, as she did between 1978 and 1982. Pires’s Mozart is great, as is her Chopin, but of course, her repertoire is much broader than that: she also made wonderful recordings of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann.
Susan Graham is 65, which is hard to believe; she’s one of the best mezzo-sopranos America has ever produced. Her Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro and Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia are pure delight.
Isaac Stern was born on July 21st of 1920, 105 years ago. He was not just a great violinist; he was a cultural figure, the likes of which we greatly miss these days.
We should also mention two conductors: Igor Markevitch, who was also a composer. Born on July 27th of 1912, in Kiev, then the Russian Empire, he spent most of his life in France and Italy. Finally, Riccardo Muti turns 84 today.