Telemann, 2026

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 Georg Philipp Telelmann 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.

Chopin, the Calendar, Vivaldi 2026

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.