This Week in Classical Music: January 19, 2026.  Furtwängler, Part I. January 25^th marks the 140^th anniversary of Wilhelm Furtwängler, one of the most important conductors of the 20^th century.  Furtwängler, who died more than half a century ago, is still highly admired by musicians and the public alike.  Many of his younger peers considered him the greatest conductor ever: Carlos Kleiber called him that and declined to perform some of Beethoven’s and Bruckner’s symphonies, because Furtwängler “said it all” already.  Claudio Abbado called him “the greatest of all,” and so did numerous other major conductors.  The German musical scene during the Weimar Republic, and to some extent, during the Nazi era, the time when Furtwängler was active, was incredibly rich.  Think of the conductors of that era, all working at the same time: Otto Klemperer (born in 1885), Hans Knappertsbusch (b. in 1888), Erich Kleiber, Carlos’s father (b. in 1890), Karl Böhm (b. in 1894), George Szell (b. in 1897), Eugen Jochum (b. in 1902), and the young Herbert von Karajan (b. in 1908).   They led major orchestras in Germany and Austria, as musically (if not politically) the two countries were united for centuries, with musicians moving from one country to another with ease, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic one day and the Vienna Philharmonic the next, and teaching in the conservatories of both countries.  After the war (and some earlier), they became leaders of major international orchestras.  But within this group, Furtwängler was considered primus inter pares by the public, critics, and, importantly, political leaders.  The latter became Furtwängler’s biggest problem. 

Wilhelm Furtwängler was born in Schöneberg (now part of Berlin) into a highly cultured and well-to-do family.  He was immersed in the arts from childhood, and music was his major love.  He studied the piano and composition (he composed his first pieces at the age of seven).  Furtwängler began conducting partly to perform his own music, as other conductors were not very keen on it.  For a long time, he felt that he was a composer first, conductor second.  His first formal conducting position was in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland); from there, he went to Zurich and the opera theater in Strasbourg, then, as Breslau, part of Germany.  At the age of 25, he was appointed the music director of the Lübeck Opera, after which he assumed the same position at the more important Mannheim Opera.  By the late 1910s, he was considered Germany’s leading young conductor.  When Arthur Nikisch, who led the Berlin Philharmonic and the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestras, died in 1922, Furtwängler assumed his positions in both cities.  Being the music director of the Berlin Philharmonic was (and is) the most prestigious position in Germany, and Furtwängler was associated with the orchestra, except for an interruption after the war, for the rest of his life. 

In the 1920s – early 30s, Furtwängler’s fame grew, both in Germany and in Britain, other European countries, and the US, where he had very successful tours.  Even though his interpretations were superb in their overarching form, the flexible tempos, and the sound his orchestras created, he cut a rather unusual figure on the podium.  Tall, gangly, his gestures were imprecise (some musicians, not the Berliners, of course, complained that they didn’t quite understand them), he never beat the tempo (unlike Toscanini), his communications during rehearsals were practically non-verbal – he would mutter something, rarely saying anything beyond “good.”  His connection to the orchestra musicians happened on some other level, and in his awkward way, he could conjure the music like nobody else.  We can hear it in his recording, even if the quality is poor.   

And then, in 1933, the Nazis came to power. 

Bruckner’s Symphony no. 8 is one of the compositions Carlos Kleiber refused to perform because he couldn’t express anything beyond what Furtwängler had already done.  There are several recordings of Furtwängler conducting this symphony.  We selected the one made in Vienna’s Musikverein, on October 17, 1944, at the end of WWII, when the impending catastrophic defeat of Germany was clear, if unacknowledged.  The Vienna Philharmonic is conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler.  First movement here, the whole symphony here. 

This Week in Classical Music: January 12, 2026.  Feldman and Picander.  Morton Feldman was born 100 years ago in Queens, NY, into a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia.  Feldman was an unusual composer, very much influenced by the abstract art of his time.  He studied with Stefan Wolpe, a German-American composer, himself a student of Franz Schreker, and close to Schoenberg’s circle.  In his youth, Feldman was influenced by Edgard Varèse, a French-American composer we celebrated recently.  Later, he became friends with John Cage, with whom he shared some aesthetic sensibilities, but it was the art of abstract painters like Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank O'Hara that fascinated him the most.  One of the most important elements of Feldman's atonal music was his treatment of time: open, it was said, and disorienting.  As a result, many of his compositions are exceedingly long, making them practically unplayable.  Of the shorter pieces, here is Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, inspired by and dedicated to Mark Rothko, an abstract painter and Feldman’s friend, who committed suicide soon after completing 14 paintings in a chapel in Houston.  And here’s his For Frank O’Hara.

Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, an Italian composer, was born on January 12^th of 1876, in Venice.  A son of a German father and Italian mother, he spent his time in Munich and Venice and was torn during WWI when Germany and Italy fought each other (he went to neutral Switzerland).  Wolf-Ferrari was mostly an opera composer, and his Il segreto di Susanna, from 1909, is sometimes staged these days.

Niccolò Piccinni and César Cui were also born this week; the former, an Italian symphonist and opera composer popular in his day, was born on January 16, 1728, in Bari. The latter, a Russian composer of French-Polish descent, was born on January 18, 1835, in Wilno, the Russian Empire, now Vilnius, Lithuania.  Piccini was competing with Gluck for the public’s attention in Paris, and, it seems, was more popular, even if these days we remember Gluck as a great composer and Piccini not at all.  César Cui was part of the Mighty Five, probably the least “mighty” of them.

We’d also like to mark the anniversary of a person who was not a musician but still occupies an important place in the history of music.  Picander, born January 14^th of 1700 as Christian Friedrich Henrici, was Bach’s favorite librettist.  Born near Dresden, he moved to Leipzig in 1720.  Picander started his poetic career writing erotic verse, without much success.  Not giving up, he switched to religious texts and published a more successful selection of poems, noticed by Bach in 1725.  After that time, he worked with Bach, soon becoming his friend, writing texts to many of his cantatas, including the Coffee Cantata and Easter Cantata, which Bach eventually turned into Easter Oratorio, and, most importantly, the St. Matthew Passion.  Apparently, Picander also wrote texts to several of Bach’s cantatas, music to which had been lost.  Picander died in Leipzig in 1764.

This Week in Classical Music: January 5, 2026.  The Piano Day.  We think January 5^th should be officially proclaimed Piano Day, as three great pianists of the second half of the 20^th century were born on this day: Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, in 1920, Alfred Brendel, in 1931, and Maurizio Pollini, in 1942.  As pianists and as musicians, they were all very different, and it’s impossible to characterize them in a sentence.  We could probably say that Michelangeli’s playing was aristocratic and perfectionist, that Brendel was one of the deepest thinkers of the keyboard, while Pollini’s playing escapes definition: his repertoire was enormous, and he was brilliant in Chopin as much as in Beethoven or composers of the 20^th century.  Pollini’s technique was spectacular for much of his career (not surprisingly, it faltered as Pollini approached his seventies).  Brendel was never a virtuoso, and he acknowledged it himself, but his technique was more than adequate, and many of his recordings are profound.  And listening to Michelangeli’s live recordings, one gets a feeling that he never made any mistakes.

We wanted to illustrate the difference in their styles by presenting a piece that all three had recorded, but it turned out to be a difficult task.  First of all, Michelangeli’s repertoire was relatively limited, and he recorded less than his contemporaries.  Brendel’s recording output was broader, but he concentrated on the German classics, especially Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, and Liszt.  As far as we can tell, Brendel recorded very little of Chopin: only four Polonaises and Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante.  Pollini’s recording output, on the other hand, was very large: his Deutsche Grammophon set consists of 62 CDs.  Interestingly, one of the few Chopin pieces that Pollini had not recorded was Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante.  Michelangeli did, so that was a close call.

In our search, we probably missed some recordings, but the only composition that we could find that all three of them recorded is rather unexpected: it is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 4, op. 7, nicknamed the Grand Sonata.  It is an early piece, written in 1796, and one of Beethoven’s longest sonatas, running almost half an hour.  Michelangeli recorded it in 1971, Brendel in 1977, and Pollini’s is from the 2012 recording (there’s another recording, made in 1977, but we couldn’t find it).  Pollini's performance is fastest, running about 25 minutes; Brendel’s is almost 31 minutes.  Michelangeli takes the slowest tempo: his sonata is one minute longer than Brendel’s.  We thought it would be easier to compare, say, the first movement, rather than the interpretations of the whole sonata.  So, here is Michelangeli, who plays the Allegro in a very measured 9 minutes and 46 seconds, here is Brendel, who takes eight and a half minutes, and here – Pollini, whose first movement flies in 7 minutes and 33 seconds.  And of course, we have the complete sonatas as well: here, here, and here.  Enjoy!

This Week in Classical Music: December 29, 2025.  Happy New Year!  We won’t bother our readers and listeners with anything serious; this is the time to be joyous and happy.  Therefore, we’ll present a cheerful canzon, Matona, mia cara, mi follere, by the great Renaissance composer Orlando di Lasso.  In it, a German soldier (a Landsknecht) serenades, in broken Italian, a girl while standing under her window.  He tries to seduce her, but his Italian doesn’t allow for any subtleties.  The song starts like this: “My lovely Lady, I want a song to sing/Under your window: this lancer is a jolly fellow!” but that’s as far as we’ll go, as it gets bawdier from there (you can read it both in Italian and in English here).  This canzon, part of a set called Villanelle, moresche e altre canzoni, was published in 1581, when Lasso was around 50, when, as he himself said, “he should have known better.”  It is performed (here) by the Hilliard Ensemble.

This Week in Classical Music: December 22, 2025.  Christmas is coming (and Varèse).  This time of the year may be rather challenging for a music lover: “Christmas music” is being played everywhere, and much of it is kitsch.  Of course, there are tremendous pieces of music written for this wonderful holiday, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio first and foremost (we presented all of it, in several installments, some years earlier).  The late Baroque Italians wrote numerous concertos for Christmas, but most of them are not particularly interesting.  Last year, we presented Telemann’s Christmas Oratorio, which isn’t played often (it was new to us).  So, this year, we’ll skip all that and go for something very different, in a way something opposite of traditional Christmas carols: the music of Edgard Varèse, a French-American composer.  Varèse’s output is small, but his influence was significant, both on American and European composers (here’s a partial list).  Varèse was born in Paris on this day, December 22^nd, in 1883.  He spent his childhood in Burgundy, was brought by his parents to Turin when he was 10 (his father was of Italian descent), studied math and some music there, and returned to Paris at the age of 20.  In Paris, he took classes at the Schola Cantorum and the Conservatory (his teachers were Albert Roussel, Charles-Marie Widor, and Vincent d’Indy), befriended Apollinaire and Satie, met Romain Rolland and Debussy, composed some, and conducted.  At the onset of WWI, he moved to New York.   He settled in the Village, met artists, local and French, and got involved with the promotion of contemporary music, his long-standing interest.  To that end, he founded the International Composers’ Guild, which organized performances of the Viennese (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern – Varèse was much taken by atonal music), Stravinsky, and French contemporary composers.  Later, Varèse established the Pan American Association of Composers, again to promote experimental music. 

In the late 1920s and 1930s, Varèse spent some time in Europe, mostly in France, and then fell into depression, not composing for 10 years.  For a long time, he was interested in music as “organized sound,” and felt that electronically-produced sounds have great potential.  In 1954, he received an anonymous gift: a tape recorder.  Varèse experimented with the tape first in New York, and then in Europe, first in France, and then in the Philips laboratories in Eindhoven, where in 1958, he completed a piece for tape alone called Poème électronique.  It was composed for the Filips pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair (the pavilion was built by the famous architect Le Corbusier).  325 loudspeakers, spread around the pavilion, were encased in the walls and played Poème électronique.  Iannis Xenakis, who assisted Le Corbusier in designing the pavilion – he was not just a composer but an architect as well – created a separate piece of music that could be heard at the pavilion’s entrance and exit.  We can only imagine the totality of the impression, visual, aural, and spatial.   

So, in the spirit of diversity, instead of some orchestrated Christmas carols, we’ll hear two of Varèse’s compositions, an early one, Intégrales, composed in 1923-25, sort of a Dada-Industrial piece, and Poème électronique.  The former is performed by the Ensemble InterContemporain under the direction of Pierre Boulez (here).  The latter is a digital transfer of the tape created by Varèse for the World Fair (here). 

This Week in Classical Music: December 15, 2025.  Beethoven.  Tomorrow, December 16^th, is Ludwig van Beethoven’s anniversary, or at least that’s usually assumed, as all we know he was baptized on December 17^th of 1770; at that time in Germany, newborns were customarily baptized within a day.  Till this week, in our library, we had 29 out of 32 published piano sonatas that Beethoven composed during his life (at the age of 12-13, he wrote several piano sonatas, but later in life, he never intended to publish them).  The piano sonata no. 1, op. 2, no. 1, was composed in 1790-92, the last one, no.32, op. 111, thirty years later, in 1821-22.  We think that all of Beethoven’s numbered sonatas are great, even those composed for his students and friends (that’s not to say that we believe everything Beethoven wrote to be great: as all composers, with the possible exception of Mozart, he had his slips).  One of the three sonatas we were missing but now have is the no. 15, op. 28, Pastoral, composed in Vienna in 1801 and dedicated to Joseph von Sonnenfels, an enlightened writer and jurist, and a friend of Mozart’s.  1801 was a difficult time in Beethoven’s life: his deafness was progressing, and he was depressed.  On the other hand, around that time, he fell in love with at least two women: the beautiful Giulietta Guicciardi, his 17-year-old piano student (Beethoven dedicated his “Moonlight” sonata to her; the relationship was platonic), and his nascent relationship with the then still-married Josephine Brunsvik, to whom the “immortal beloved” letter was addressed (or at least that’s a popular assumption).

As for the sonata no. 15, it turns out that it was not a coincidence that we didn’t have this one in the library until now: even though we think it’s one of Beethoven’s best, it is rarely played in concert.  The wonderful Czech pianist Ivan Moravec is superb in it, here.  The vinyl was issued in the US in 1970 by the Connoisseur Society, but we suspect that the recording was made earlier.

As we had some technical issues with the site, we’re late with this entry, and shall make it brief.  Zoltán Kodály, the Hungarian composer, who created a unique method of music education, was born on December 16^th of 1882.  The Soviet composer Rodion Shchedrin, the husband of Maya Plisetskaya, was born in Moscow on December 16^th of 1932.  And finally, Domenico Cimarosa, the Neapolitan composer of numerous operas, of which l matrimonio segreto (The Secret Marriage) is still quite popular, was born on December 17^th of 1749.