This Week in Classical Music: April 6, 2026.  Venice, La Fenice, Kissin.  What could be better than a recital by one of the greatest pianists, played in a gorgeous old theater in one of the most beautiful cities in the world?  Or, rather, what could go wrong?  As it turns out, some things can.  First, the venue.  La Fenice is a small but exceptionally beautiful theater (if not the neo-classical façade, then definitely the interior).  It was built in 1792 and named La Fenice, or The Phoenix, after the immortal bird of Greek legend that rises to new life from the ashes: the company that owned the theater previously lost three buildings to fire.  Unfortunately, the name proved prophetic, as La Fenice burned to the ground on two occasions, in 1836 and, recently, in 1996.   Both times it was restored, after the first time within just one year, while in modern times, it took the bureaucratic state seven times longer.  Still, the job was done well, and La Fenice gleams in its 19^th-century beauty.  It’s a relatively small theater, with a tiny main floor, which becomes even smaller when several front rows are removed for the concert stage.  On the other hand, it’s tall, with five circles of boxes, all identical except for the Royal Box.  For a piano recital, this creates an acoustic problem, as there are no panels above the stage to reflect sound into the hall.  It’s especially evident in the boxes, which, by the way, are bare: boxes, quite literally.  Even in the ones close to the stage, the sound felt distant.  Kissin, who started his program with Beethoven’s early Piano Sonata no. 7, exacerbated the problem by minimally using the pedal.  We understand his intent, and in a different hall, it might have worked, but in La Fenice, without the pedal, the sound was dry and failed to project.  We even thought it might have been a problem with the instrument: Kissin was playing a Steinway with the Zanta logo under the maker’s name.  Zanta, an Italian company, makes its own pianos, but it seems in this case it was a standard Steinway D-274.

We thought that Beethoven's sonata, with its exaggerated accents and very slow 2^nd and 3^rd movements, was not very successful.  The five mazurkas by Chopin that followed fared better, even though they were also rather austere.   Schumann’s Kreisleriana, which started the second half, was the best.  Rambling and longish, it’s not an easy piece to pull together, but Kissin managed it very well.  The concluding Hungarian Rhapsody no 12, even if a rather unusual choice for such a cerebral concert, was brilliant, demonstrating Kissin’s amazing technical abilities.

But we would be the first to admit that all these comments are somewhat nitpicking.  Kissin is a tremendous musician and a phenomenal pianist, whether one agrees with his interpretations or not.  La Fenice is beautiful, and Venice is magical.  You leave the theater and step into one of the most beautiful places, and a glass of good Italian wine helps bring a great evening to an end.

This Week in Classical Music: March 30, 2026.  Bologna, Ferrara (and Modena).  Historically, Bologna, with its numerous churches and a very old university, was one of the most musical cities in Italy.  It had a fine violin school – makers, players, and composers (Corelli, Torelli and Vitali were part of it).  Starting in the early 17^th century, numerous literary and artistic Academies were established, some, like Accademia dei Floridi, dedicated to music (Monteverdi and Merula were members).  In 1660, the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna was founded, with academicians divided into orders: the composers, instrumentalists, and singers (Mozart, whila in Italy, submitted a composition for examination there).  The Academy continued into the 19^th and 20^th centuries, presenting important concerts and composers. 

As early as the 15^th and 16^th centuries, Ferrara (and after 1598, Modena, where the d’Este court relocated when the pope took over their seat of power) was one of the most important musical centers in Italy.  We’ve written about Ferrara’s Concerto delle donne, and will return to the musical tradition in that city in a later post (Modena deserves a separate entry). 

This Week in Classical Music: March 23, 2026.  Venice.  In the 17^th-18^th centuries, Venice was the epicenter of the opera world.  The first public opera theater, Teatro San Cassiano, opened there in 1637, and a year later, the second one, Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo, was built.  By the end of the 17^th century, Venice had about six working opera houses, give or take: fires were common and were the main cause for theaters closing, and new ones were built.  Today, Venice has two: the famous La Fenice, built in 1792, and a much older Teatro Malibran.  Named after the great soprano sfogato, it was inaugurated in 1678 and, for a while, was the largest theater in Venice.  La Fenice burned to the ground three times: in 1774, 1856, and in 1996 (it was reopened in its current form in 2004).  These days, operas are not staged in Venice as often as one would hope, but a visit to La Fenice is inspiring, so, instead of an opera, we heard a recital given by Evgeny Kissin.  A short review will follow soon. 

This Week in Classical Music: March 16, 2026.  Johann Sebastian Bach.  Last week, we celebrated Georg Philipp Telemann; this week, it's Johann Sebastian Bach’s turn: their birthdays are one week apart. Bach was born on March 21^st of 1685, in Eisenach.  A word of warning: even though it’s Bach, we’ll be very brief: Classical Connect is about to embark on a trip.  We celebrated Telemann with a cantata (one from the output of more than 1,000) that, for a long time, was ascribed to Bach, but was eventually proven to be his.  Johann Sebastian, also quite prolific in this genre, composed more than 200 extant cantatas that are considered authentic by musicologists, plus several dozen have been lost.  If selecting a Telemann cantata was practically impossible because of the sheer volume of them, selecting a Bach cantata is also difficult, but for a different reason: too many of them are exceptionally good.  Cantata no. 51, Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen ("Rejoice in God in every land") is unusual: it’s the only Bach cantata for soprano and trumpet, and no choir.  In this 1972 recording, the wonderful Edith Mathis is the soprano, Pierre Thibaud solos on the trumpet; Karl Richter leads his Münchener Bach-Orchester. 

Next week, Classical Connect will be in Venice, later traveling to several cities in Marche and Emilia-Romagna.  We will report. 

This Week in Classical Music: March 9, 2026.  Telemann and more.  Georg Philipp Telemann was born in Magdeburg on March 14, 1681.  Four years older than his friend Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, whom Telemann also knew well, he was also the godfather of Johann Sebastian’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Philipp in the younger Bach’s name comes from Telemann.  The most prolific composer of his time, he wrote more than 3,000 compositions, including 1,700 cantatas, of which 1,400 are extant, and that’s just part of his output.  He also composed 125 orchestral suites and 125 concertos, several dozen operas, and much more.  We’ve complained (if that’s a proper word) about this prodigious output in our previous posts: it’s impossible to play all his works or even read all the sheet music.  So there are no “Telemann’s greatest hits,” because even if somebody were to put such a list together, we know that it wouldn’t be in any way real.  And we know that Telemann’s compositions were quite uneven: some pieces are rather mediocre, on the other hand, some were good enough to be mistaken for works of Johann Sebastian Bach, an acknowledged genius, only to turn out to be written by Telemann.  (It’s worth noting that during his lifetime, Telemann, a worldly figure, was much more famous than Bach, a cantor of Thomaskirche, Leipzig.) 

Some years ago, we posted an entry detailing events in Telemann’s life; you can read it here.  Today, we’ll present one of his numerous cantatas, and rather than listening to hundreds of them and selecting one, we’re taking an easy way out: it’s yet another cantata, formerly attributed to Bach, which belongs to Telemann’s pen.  It’s called Ich weiß, daß mein Erlöser lebt (I know that my Redeemer lives), and you can listen to it here.  Peter Schreier conducts the Festival Strings Lucerne and sings the tenor part. 

Several other composers have their anniversaries this week.  Josef Mysliveček, a Czech who spent half of his life in Italy, was born in Prague on March 9^th of 1737.  Mysliveček was 20 years older than Mozart: when they met in Bologna in 1770, Mozart was just a 14-year-old boy, but they became friends (Papa Leopold brought his son to Italy on one of their “Grand Tours” to demonstrate his phenomenal abilities as pianist, violinist and composer, and earn some money in the process).  It seems that Mysliveček influenced the style of Mozart’s earlier compositions, not that we’re comparing the magnitude of their talent.  Here’s Mysliveček’s Octet for an unusual combination of wind instruments: 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns.  It was composed around the time he met Mozart (and when Mozart composed Mitridate, re di Ponto, his fifth opera). 

Two prominent composers of the 20^th century were also born this week: Arthur Honegger, a member of the French group “Les Six,” in Le Havre on March 10^th of 1892, and one of the most important American composers of the last century, Samuel Barber, in West Chester, PA, on March 9^th of 1910.  Barber wrote in a more traditional idiom than many of his contemporaries (a good example is his famous Adagio for Strings). Much of his output was for the voice: songs accompanied by the piano or orchestra, and choral compositions.  here’s Barber’s Piano Concerto, composed in 1962 and premiered that year at the festivities surrounding the opening of the Philharmonic Hall of the Lincoln Center (later the Avery Fisher Hall and now Geffen Hall).  John Browning performed at the premiere and is featured in this recording, made two years later, with George Szell conducting the Cleveland Orchestra. 

This Week in Classical Music: March 2, 2026.  Chopin, the Calendar, Vivaldi.  Were we to follow the American tradition, our week would start on a Sunday, which this week was March 1st, Frederic Chopin’s birthday.  But we follow the “scientific” practice (yes, there’s even an international standard for it!), and start our weeks on Mondays, and because of that, we just missed Chopin’s birthday by a day.  But he’s too great a composer to be missed, isn’t he?  We wanted to find a performance by a pianist (as Chopin was first and foremost a piano composer), also born this week, but, alas, came up empty-handed: not a single significant pianist has an anniversary this week.  So we went back a month to Arthur Rubinstein, in our opinion, the greatest Chopinist of all time, who was born on February 28^th of 1887.   We missed his birthday as well, being preoccupied with Furtwängler (we also skipped several other wonderful pianists, from Leopold Godowsky (b. 2/13/1870) and Josef Hoffman (b. 1/20/1876) to Yuja Want (b. 2/10/1987).  Hoffman was an unfortunate omission, as it was his 150^th anniversary. 

But back to Chopin and Rubinstein.  Rubinstein loved his countryman’s music so much that one could assume that he recorded all of it, as did, for example, Nikita Magaloff, who not only recorded all of Chopin’s piano works but also played them all in public, in a series of six concerts.  (We missed Magaloff’s birthday too: this wonderful Russian-Georgian-Swiss pianist was born on February 21^st of 1912).  Rubinstein was more selective.  There were pieces that he recorded several times, for example, the Polonaise in F-sharp minor, Op. 44, which he did three times, in 1935, 1951, and 1964.  On the other hand, he recorded only three Etudes from op. 10 (nos. 4, 5, and 12), and four from the Etudes op. 25 (nos. 1, 2, 3, and 5).  It’s a mystery to us why Rubinstein didn’t record the rest of them: he obviously had the technique (his recordings of the challenging Scherzos are brilliant), and musically Chopin’s etudes are marvelous short pieces, not just exercises for beginners, like Carl Czerny’s.  We love practically all of Rubinstein’s Chopin, including the Ballades.  Here’s no 3, recorded in 1959. 

This week is unusually rich in talent.  Antonio Vivaldi, Carlo Gesualdo, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Bedřich Smetana, Maurice Ravel, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Kurt Weill were all born this week: two Italians, two Germans, one Czech, one Frenchman, and one Brazilian, a wonderful constellation.  To celebrate these composers, we’ll play some of their music.  Moro, lasso, al mio duolo (I die, alas, in my suffering) is a fantastical chromatic madrigal by Gesualdo, published in 1611 (here).  It sounds original and fresh today; it shocked listeners when it was first performed, and even a century later, Charles Burney, the British musicologist and historian, called it “shocking and disgusting.”   

Sometimes one gets the impression that all Vivaldi wrote was the Four Seasons.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Tremendously prolific, Vivaldi wrote hundreds of concertos for different instruments, operas, sacred music, and much more.  Here’s an example of Vivaldi’s church music, Introduzione al Miserere “Filiæ Mæstæ Jerusalem” (The mournful daughters of Jerusalem) for the alto, strings, and basso continuo.  The Miserere itself, to which this was an introduction, has been lost. 

And finally, C.P.E. Bach’s late Fantasia in F-Sharp Minor, Wq. 67 (here).  It’s performed by Ana-Marija Markovina, a Croatian pianist who recorded all C.P.E.’s piano works.