This Week in Classical Music: September 22, 2025.  Rameau, Shostakovich and more.  Several anniversaries of very important composers happen this week, and also those of composers who may not be as famous internationally but are important in their respective countries.  The big names are Jeanand Dmitri Shostakovich, the former, one of the most significant French Baroque composers of the 18^th century, the latter, together with Prokofiev, the most celebrated Soviet one.  We’ve written about both of them many times, for example, here about Rameau, or here about Shostakovich, so today, we will present some of their music and move on to the lesser stars.  We’ll hear excerpts from Rameau’s opera Les fêtes d'Hébé, an opera-ballet that premiered in 1739 in the theater of the Palais-Royal.  His second opera-ballet, after Les Indes galantes, Les fêtes was very successful.  The best singers and dancers were engaged, and it became Rameau’s most successful opera, with 80 stagings in the first year.  Here are the first three numbers from the ballet music for Les fêtes.  The English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Raymond Leppard.

As for Shostakovich, here’s one of his quartets, no 6, from 1956.  Shostakovich’s quartets are less “political” than his symphonies, and this one is mostly lighthearted, a rarity for the composer.  It’s performed by the Fitzwilliam Quartet.

One of our “lesser stars” is the Lithuanian composer and painter, Mikalojus Čiurlionis, and September 22 marks his 150^th anniversary.  Čiurlionis is a Lithuanian national composer, a central figure in Lithuanian culture; he occupies a place that Sibelius holds in Finland or Grieg in Norway.  His paintings are as important as his music (and probably better known).  For centuries, Lithuania was in a union with Poland, till the Russian Empire captured it in the 1790s, and Čiurlionis wrote in Polish.  We have his detailed biography here.  Čiurlionis died at the age of 35, so most of his music is “early.”  Here, from 1901, is Nocturne Op.6, no.2.  Nikolaus Lahusen is at the piano.

As much as Čiurlionis was Lithuania’s national composer, Komitas was Armenia’s.  Komitas was born Sogomon Sogomonian on September 26^th of 1869 in the city of Kütahya, the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey).  Orphaned at the age of 12, he was sent to Etchmiadzin, Armenia's religious center, educated in a seminary there, and became an ordained priest.  He started collecting Armenian folk music soon after (the first collection was published in 1895) and then continued his musical studies in Berlin.  He stayed there for three years and then returned to Etchmiadzin, where he continued collecting folk music and publishing songs and organized a quired, with which he gave concerts in Yerevan and Tbilisi.  He later traveled to Europe and, in 1910, moved to Constantinople, Etchmiadzin being too conservative for him.  Constantinople, with the then large Armenian population, was a center of Armenian culture.  Komitas thrived there, organizing choirs, lecturing, teaching and writing music.  It all ended in 1915 with the Ottoman government-sponsored Armenian massacres.  Millions were killed.  Komitas was arrested and deported to the interior of the country.  He survived but had a mental breakdown, from which he never recovered.  He was moved to a French hospital in Constantinople and then to a mental clinic in the suburbs of Paris.  He died on October 22^nd of 1935.  Here are excerpts from Patarag, the Divine Armenian Liturgy by Komitas.  The Russian Chamber Chorus of New York (sic!) is conducted by Nikolai Kachanov.

This Week in Classical Music: September 15, 2025.  Ghent incident and other things.  Last week, instead of our usual fare, we wrote an entry about a music critic, Eduard Hanslick.  While doing that, we missed some interesting anniversaries, so we’ll try to catch up on some of them this week.  But first, another item that caught our eye.  The Flanders Festival in Ghent has decided to cancel a concert featuring the Munich Philharmonic with Lisa Batiashvili.  The reason?  The orchestra was to be conducted by Lahav Shani, the current music director of the Israel Philharmonic and the next chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic.  As the organizer of the festival explained, “Lahav Shani has spoken out in favor of peace and reconciliation several times in the past, but in the light of his role as the chief conductor of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, we are unable to provide sufficient clarity about his attitude to the genocidal regime in Tel Aviv.”  [Emphasis is ours]. The organizers prefaced this statement by saying: “The decision has been made on the basis of our deepest conviction that music should be a source of connection and reconciliation. First and foremost, Flanders Festival Ghent aspires to be a place where artists, audiences and staff can experience music in a context of respect and safety.”  We find this malignant combination of antisemitism and wokeness appalling.  It’s especially awful coming from a presumably nonpolitical arts organization.  Fortunately, even the Prime Minister of Belgium, a country extremely critical of Israel, was shocked and condemned the action of the festival in a written statement.  He then flew to Essen, Germany, to attend the same concert that was organized on very short notice.  He met Shani and apologized to him in person.  The German reaction in general was very strong: the Berlin Philharmonic extended an invitation to Shani, the culture minister called the action of the Ghent Festival “pure antisemitism,” and the German Commissioner for Antisemitism said that it was “a completely unspeakable and deeply antisemitic act." We applaud Bart de Wever, the Prime Minister of Belgium, and the German musical and political establishments for their strong condemnation of the Ghent Festival and their support of music.  And we’re sorry that this unfortunate event had to happen in Ghent, a gem of a city that treasures one of the greatest masterpieces of visual art, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb altarpiece by Huber and Jan van Eyck. 

And now, briefly, back to music.  Arvo Pärt, an Estonian composer, turned 90 on September 11^th.  He left for Vienna and then Germany in 1980, lived there for 30 years, returned to Estonia in 2010, and has resided in his motherland since then.  In the year 2000, he wrote Cecilia, vergine romana, a piece for mixed choir and orchestra, commissioned by the Vatican as part of the celebration of the Great Jubilee.  Santa Cecilia is a patron saint of music, and, appropriately, the premiere was held by the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia orchestra.  Here it is, but in this case it’s played by the Orchestre National de France under the direction of Kristjan Järvi, Pärt’s compatriot. 

Arnold Schoenberg’s birthday was also last week; he was born on September 13^th of 1874.  Last year, as we observed Schoenberg’s 150^th anniversary (here), we found celebrations in the US muted.  While things were already changing in 2024, compared to 2020-2021, since then, they seem to have improved a bit further.  We think that had it been celebrated this year, the Schoenberg anniversary would’ve been more interesting and festive.  

Last week was exceptional with birthdays, and here are some other names: Antonín Dvořák, Henry Purcell, Girolamo Frescobaldi, William Boyce, and Clara Schumann.  And this week it’s the Swiss composer Frank Martin, the Russian Aleksandr Lokshin, and the Brit Gustav Holst.

This Week in Classical Music: September 8, 2025.  Eduard Hanslick.  We dedicate this week’s entry to one who was neither a composer nor a performer, but was more influential than most of both.  Eduard Hanslick’s 200^th anniversary is on September 11^th (an unfortunate coincidence).  He was the most important music critic in Vienna; what we find astonishing, writing this in 2025, is not the (expected) centrality of classical music in the cultural life of Vienna in the mid-19^th century, but the importance of musical criticism, a derivative of music itself.  This seems unimaginable today, when classical music has become peripheral and music criticism has practically disappeared.

Hanslick was born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into a German-speaking family.  His father was a small and rather poor landowner; his mother was Jewish, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant; she converted to Catholicism upon marrying Hanslick senior.  Richard Wagner, who would become Hanslick’s nemesis, never forgot that by blood, Hanslick was half-Jewish.  In Prague, Hanslick studied music for a while but then went to the University of Vienna, graduating with a degree in law.  But music remained his love, and even while at the university, he continued writing an occasional review.  Upon graduation, while working in different ministries, Hanslick continued writing musical criticism, first for Wiener Zeiting, the oldest newspaper in the world still in publication today, and then for another major newspaper, Die Presse, which is also still in print.  When, in 1864, two former editors of Die Presse started a new newspaper, Neue freie Presse, Hanslick joined them as a music critic and remained there for the rest of his career.  In 1854, Hanslick wrote a book, On the Beautiful in Music, one of the arguments of which was that “Music means itself,” that it has no “subject” and is not an expression of feelings.  Unfortunately, this rather conventional notion contradicted Wagner’s ideas.  Just three years earlier, Wagner had published an essay, Opera and Drama, in which he, while describing “music drama” as the synthesis of music, poetry and spectacle, also maintained that his music expresses the feelings intrinsic to poetry and drama.  This made the programmatic “esthetic of feelings” quite popular in the German-speaking world, and Hanslick’s refutation created a torrent of responses, both positive and negative.  The book earned Hanslick a position of professor of “History and esthetics of music” at the University of Vienna, the first such position at any European university.  On the other hand, Wagner took umbrage and, in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, created a character of Beckmesser, a town clerk and singer, who maliciously judges Walther’s performance, as a caricature of Hanslick.  And in his essay, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner declared that Hanslick’s “Jewish style” of criticism is anti-German.

While writing for Neue freie Presse, Hanslick became the leading music critic of Vienna, which itself was the foremost music center of Europe.  He had rather conservative taste and wasn’t interested in music before Mozart.  He felt that Beethoven had reached the pinnacle and that Schumann and Brahms were the main talents to follow him.  Brahms became a close friend and Hanslick his major supporter and promoter.  Hanslick tried to be objective toward Wagner’s music.  He openly admired his virtuoso orchestration; he liked Tannhäuser and, surprisingly, Meistersinger, despite the “Beckmesser affair.”  At the same time, he felt that the whole concept of “music drama” is detrimental to music development.  Hanslick could be very cutting: “The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.”  Hanslick was also very negative toward Liszt and Bruckner, one composer who needed a lot of encouragement.  These days, Hanslick is remembered as a conservative who completely misunderstood the “new music” of Wagner and his followers.  This is true to an extent, but we also should remember that he disliked some nativist, irrational aspects of Wagner’s (and Bruckner’s) music, which the Nazis some decades later found so attractive.

This Week in Classical Music: August 31, 2025.  Bruckner and conductors.  Last year, we celebrated Bruckner’s 200^th anniversary (here).  As we approached this year’s anniversary, we noticed that the only mature symphony that is still missing from our library is Symphony no.  8 (there’s also a case of the so-called “Symphony 00,” an early composition, but we’ll get to it another time).  The Eighth Symphony was the last complete symphony composed by Bruckner: he wrote the first three movements of the Ninth Symphony, but never finished the fourth, the finale.  Bruckner started working on the Eighth in 1884, soon after the completion of the very successful Seventh.  It took him three years to finish, but when he submitted the score to the conductor Hermann Levi, a long-time supporter, complications arose.  Levi, who, by the way, was also an admirer of the music of Wagner (Levi being Jewish and Wagner an antisemite), told Bruckner that he could not perform the latest symphony, as, in his opinion, its orchestration was incomprehensible.  Bruckner, a neurotic who constantly doubted his own talent, accepted the criticism and began reworking the symphony.  The next version was completed in 1890 (while he was working on the Eighth, he also revisited his Third and Fourth).  The premiere was conducted not by Levi but by Hans Richter in Vienna in December of 1892.  Eduard Hanslick, an influential Austrian critic who supported the music of Brahms but derided Wagner and Bruckner, called the Eighth “as a whole… repellent,” but there were some positive reviews as well (Hugo Wolf, for example, liked it a lot).  Here’s the symphony in the performance by the Vienna Philharmonic under the direction of Pierre Boulez: I. Allegro moderato, II. Scherzo, III. Adagio, and IV. Finale.  This live recording was made in Linz on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the death of Anton Bruckner

Also, today is a special “Conductors Day”: three were born on this day: Tullio Serafin in 1878, Seiji Ozawa in 1935, and Leonard Slatkin in 1944.  We looked around, but it seems none of them ever recorded Bruckner’s Ninth, though Ozawa did record several of Bruckner’s symphonies.  Serafin was one of the best opera conductors of the 20^th century and led the ensembles of the Teatro della Scala for many years.  Not only did he lead opera performances, he was also a coach, developing the talents of Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, among others.  During his 60-year career, he worked with such singers as Enrico Caruso, Rosa Ponselle, Beniamino Gigli, Joan Sutherland, and Luciano Pavarotti.   Serafin had 243 operas in his repertoire.  He was almost 90 when he died in Rome in 1968.

Seiji Ozawa led the Boston Symphony for 29 years, from 1973 to 2002.  Many people criticized him, especially at the end of his tenure in Boston, but we heard him in Musikverein, Vienna, on March 24^th of 1998, conducting Mahler’s Symphony no. 3, and it was extremely good.  We can forgive him many things for that one performance.  Ozawa died in Tokyo in 2024 at the age of 88.

Leonard Slatkin is very much with us.  He was the music director of the St. Louis Symphony from 1979 to 1996, and we think these were the best days in the orchestra’s history.  He also led the National Symphony Orchestra, succeeding Mstislav Rostropovich, from 1996 to 2008.  These days, Slatkin advises orchestras and runs a radio program.

This Week in Classical Music: August 25, 2025.  Krenek.  Last week marked the 125^th anniversary of the Austrian-American composer Ernst Krenek, and we’re following up on our promise to mark it this week.  Krenek, whose name is pronounced krzhenek was born Křenek, and the Czech letter ř is pronounced as “r-zh” as, for example, in Antonín Dvořák’s last name (Krenek’s father was Czech).  Krenek replaced ř with an r when he moved to the US.  One of the reasons we wanted to get back to Krenek is that we believe he’s a talented composer who’s seriously underappreciated.  Krenek was one of the most prolific composers of the 20^th century, and, at some points in his career, one of the most celebrated.  He composed in many different styles, but he’s not the only composer with creative flexibility: Stravinsky, for example, also went through distinctly different periods.  And like Stravinsky, Krenek experimented with such different idioms as atonal and Neo-Classical, though Krenek started with the atonal, while Stravinsky came to it later in his career.  These days, Krenek’s music is rarely performed, which is a pity. 

Krenek was born in Vienna on August 23^rd of 1900.  He studied with the then-famous composer Franz Schreker, practically forgotten today.  During WWI, he was drafted into the Austrian army but spent most of the time in Vienna, continuing his studies.  In 1920, he followed Schreker to Berlin, where he was introduced to many musicians; there he met Alma Mahler, Gustav’s widow, and her daughter Anna.  By the time they met, Alma had already divorced her second husband, the architect Walter Gropius, and was living with the poet Franz Werfel.  Krenek fell in love with Anna and married her in 1924, though their marriage fell apart a few months later.  That aside, his time in Berlin was very productive: Krenek wrote 18 large-scale pieces between 1921 and 1924, many of which were radically atonal and influenced by Schoenberg.  At Alma’s request, he attempted to complete Mahler’s unfinished 10^th Symphony, but dropped the project as he realized that most of it was too underdeveloped.   

In 1925, Krenek traveled to Paris where he met the composers of Les Six; under their influence, he decided that his music should be more accessible and wrote a “jazz-opera” Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Plays), which became very popular.  Krenek followed it up with three more one-act operas, one of them, Der Diktator, based on the life of Mussolini.  In 1928, Krenek returned to Vienna, where he befriended Berg and Webern.  He became interested in the 12-tone technique, a form of serialism which attempts to give each of the 12 notes of the scale equal weight.  In 1933, he wrote an opera. Karl V, using this technique.  Its premiere in Vienna was cancelled (the politics of art, following politics in general at the time, were turning toward things simple and nationalistic), but it was staged in Prague in 1938.  Needless to say, it never gained the popularity of Jonny spielt auf.  The Nazis labeled Krenek’s music “radical” (they also claimed that Krenek was Jewish, which he wasn’t).  Things were getting difficult in Austria as well, and soon after the Anschluss, Krenek emigrated to the US.  He taught in several conservatories and universities and eventually settled in Los Angeles (he moved to Chicago in 1949 to teach at the Chicago Musical College but returned to the West Coast because of the cold winters).  He taught at Darmstadt in the early 1950s (Boulez and Stockhausen were among the attendees), continued composing using the serial technique, and experimented with electronic music.  His last piece was written when Krenek was 88.  He died in Palm Springs on December 22^nd of 1991.  Here’s an excerpt from Krenek’s Lamentatio Jeremiae prophetae for the unaccompanied choir.  Lamentations contains the music for three days of Holy Week: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday.  This is the Good Friday section.  The piece was written in 1941 in New York, during a difficult period in Krenek’s life, but also the one that provided him with access to the music of Ockeghem, the polyphony of which influenced Lamentations.  The music is atonal and complex, but we find it very interesting.  

This Week in Classical Music: August 18, 2025.  Debussy and more.  Our apologies to the composers with this week’s anniversaries, first and foremost to Claude Debussy, who was born August 22^nd of 1862: all we can do is to point to many of our past entries dedicated to this great composer, for example, here, here, here, and here.  Our haste is especially inappropriate (if unavoidable) as there are several more very interesting composers we’d like to commemorate properly.  For example, Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the most important composers of the second half of the 20^th century, was also born this week, on August 22^nd of 1928.  Antonio Salieri was born on this day 275 years ago.  Going even further back, we have Jacopo Peri, who is considered the author of the first opera, Dafne, written in 1597.  Peri was born on August 20^th of 1561, either in Rome or in Florence.

Lili Boulanger, a composer and the younger sister of Nadia Boulanger, also a composer and a teacher, was born in Paris on August 21^st of 1893.  Lili was the first woman to win the prestigious Grand Prix de Rome.  She was only 24 when she died of tuberculosis.  Another French composer, Benjamin Godard, was born on this day, August 18^th, in 1849.  He was one of the few Jewish-French composers of the 19^th century; we know of only two more: Alkan and Halévy (both Meyerbeer and Offenbach, also Jewish, were born in Germany, even though they spent a lot of time in France).

Ernst Krenek’s 125^th anniversary is on August 23^rd.  We find his music interesting and underappreciated, so we’ll come back to it next week.  That’s all for now.