Franz Schubert - Piano trio no. 2, D. 929, 2nd mov., Andante con moto
David Oistrakh (Violin)
Sviatoslav Knushevitsky (Cello)
Lev Oborin (Piano)

New Year 2024

This Week in Classical Music: January 1, 2024.  Happy New Year!

Christmas 2023

This Week in Classical Music: December 25, 2023.  Christmas.  We wish our listeners a Merry Adoration of the Shepherds by Domenico Ghirlandaio Christmas! On this wonderful day, we won’t bother you with disquisitions and analyses but will present some Christmas music for your pleasure – and this joyful piece is perfect for the occasion. It’s the first section of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, a cantata known for the initial words of the first chorus as Jauchzet, frohlocket! (Shout for joy, exult). It was first performed on this day in 1734, in the morning, at St. Nicholas; and then in the afternoon, at St. Thomas in Leipzig: Bach, as Thomaskantor, was the music director of both churches and led both performances. What we will hear is a recording made in January of 1987 by John Eliot Gardiner conducting the English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir and several prominent soloists, Anne-Sophie von Otter among them. Enjoy and see you in 2024!

Three Pianists, December 2023

This Week in Classical Music: December 18, 2023.  Three Pianists.  During the last month, we were preoccupied with composers and completely ignored the performers, who bring their music Radu Pupu to the public. So today we bring you three wonderful pianists: Radu Lupu, a Romanian, Mitsuko Uchida, born in Japan, and András Schiff, a British-Hungarian. All three belong to the same generation: Lupu was born in 1945 (on November 30th), Uchida in 1948 (on December 20th), and Schiff – in 1953, on December 21st. Uchida and Schiff are still performing, Lupu died on April 17th of last year.

Radu Lupu is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of his time. He studied in Moscow with Heinrich Neuhaus, who also taught Richter and Gilels. In the three years from 1966 to 1969, he won three major piano competitions, the Cliburn, the Enescu, and the Leeds, and embarked on an international career with successful concerts in London. Though he played all major composers of the 18th and 19th centuries, he was most closely associated with the music of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. Here is Schubert’s Impromptu in A flat major, D. 935, no. 2 from a legendary 1982 Decca recording of Schubert’s Impromptus D. 899 and D.935. Mitsuko Uchida, by Richard Avedon

Lupu probably didn’t need any competition wins for his tremendous talent to be noticed by the public and the critics. Mitsuko Uchida didn’t need them either: all she got from competing in the majors was second place in the 1975 Leeds (a solid Dmitry Alekseyev won, and Schiff shared the third prize). Uchida’s family moved to Vienna when she was 12. She studied there at the Academy of Music (Wilhelm Kempff was one of her teachers). In the 1980s Uchida moved to London and has lived there since. In 2009, she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the second-highest British award. Uchida is rightfully famous for her Mozart, but her repertoire is very broad, from Haydn to Schoenberg. Here’s Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 12 in F major, K.332, and here – one of the 12 Etudes by Debussy, no. 3, Pour les Quartes.

András Schiff fared even worse than Uchida in international competitions: in addition to third prize at the Leeds which we mentioned above, all he got was a shared fourth prize at the 1974 Tchaikovsky competition (the 18-year-old Andrei Gavrilov was the winner; a talented pianist, he had an interesting but brief career, which in its significance could not be compared to Schiff’s). András Schiff was born into a Jewish family in Budapest. He studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music there (György Kurtág was one of his professors and Zoltán Kocsis, who studied there at the same time, became a friend). He also took summer classes with Tatiana Nikolayeva and Bella Davidovich. Since the late 1980s he, like Uchida, has been living in London, and like her, was knighted (in 2014). Schiff is one of the most admired pianists of his generation; he feels comfortable in many venues: he plays recitals and concertos, loves ensemble playing, and often accompanies singers. His Bach is wonderful, but so are his Mozart and Haydn, Schubert and Schumann. He often played the music of his fellow Hungarian Bela Bartók but is very critical of the current political situation in his country of birth and even said that he’ll never set foot there. Here’s András Schiff playing Bach’s French Suite no. 4, recorded in 1991. This recording was made in Reitstadel, a former animal feed storage barn built in the 14th century and in our time converted into a concert hall. It’s located in the Bavarian town of Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz.