Composers Episodes

Is Ludwig van Beethoven neglected? No, not at all. But with the well-deserved emphasis on his symphonies, a couple of piano concertos and a handful of piano sonatas and string quartets; there is another roughly eighty hours of music to explore. And in the same way that maybe Picasso, Rembrandt, Shakespeare and Dickens created very little that is not of extraordinary quality… there is a bunch of incredible music that is not going to be encountered by the casual listener and that is what I want to...

When a podcast is about five hundred years of music, there is going to be a reasonable amount of music from people who are no longer with us. Now if you combine that with the baggage of the term ‘classical’ then you can kind of forget that there is a lot of music being written, performed, recorded and released right now. Music by composers who are still very much amongst the living. And you are going to hear from seven of them in this episode… Gabriela Ortiz, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Maria Grenfell, Uns...

Who are 'the other Russians’? Well, I’ve played a fair bit of music by Russian and Soviet era composers in the show. Tchaikovsky got two whole episodes and there has been relatively frequent appearances by Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Shostakovich. But there are a quite a number of other composers more than worthy of a good listen who I have largely ignored… ‘the other Russians’. So for this episode I have music by Glinka, Balakirev, Borodin, Mussorgsky and Scriabin. ...

He was taught by Antonio Salieri and his music was admired by Ludwig van Beethoven… but he enjoyed very little success in his short lifetime. It would take decades after his death for his music to make its way onto concert stages… and for him to become one of the best loved composers who ever lived. If you are new to his music I hope that over the next hour and a bit I’ll give you a sense of why that is the case. I’m going to concentrate on music Schubert wrote between 1814 and 1822, that is bet...

Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937) is arguably the most beloved composer France has given the world… able to take classical and pre-classical forms, absorb the harmonic colours of Impressionism, draw on the dance traditions of his Basque mother's heritage, and infuse his later work with the energy of early jazz. All of it synthesised into a language that is quite distinctly his own. In this episode… a section of his first Piano Concerto, the Pavane for a Dead Princess, a little taste of his String Quar...

Music written by people related to the composer Johann Sebastian Bach. That may seem an odd way put a show together. If you were to make a playlist of the greatest hits of people related to Taylor Swift, it would be a very short list. But if you ever wanted to get into a complicated debate about nature versus nurture, the Bach clan of what is now northern Germany would be an interesting place to start. Somewhere between twenty and thirty relatives of Johann Sebastian Bach wrote music still recor...

Haydn’s music is in no way neglected or forgotten but I wonder if, because he lived a long life, during which he achieved significant success and seemed free of personality disorders, he is a little taken for granted. The creative artist dying at the height of his or her powers, or never recognised in their lifetime, or plagued by psychosis all seem to have an extra attraction for us. And Haydn was born a couple of generations before the ‘artist as hero’ cult began to emerge. For most of his wor...

I did an episode of music by women composers back in November based around a CD Box release by the record label ‘Brilliant Classics’ and called it ‘Brilliant Women’. No prizes for imagination but it was clear and accurate. So, I am going to keep things simple and call this show ‘More Brilliant Women’. I could also call it ‘music I am genuinely extremely excited to play for you that just happens to be written by women’. But that would be a little cumbersome. What I can say is this is just fabulou...

Here is the third Classical For Everyone podcast featuring the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I’ve done an episode on the music Mozart wrote in the last year of his life, 1791, back in June and one focused on 1786 last October. This one is still going to use the ‘year in the musical life’ theme but it will be a little looser… covering the year or so on each side of the pivotal moment in Mozart’s life and career where he left Salzburg and moved to Vienna in 1781. It gives me a chance to play y...

It’s Classical For Everyone’s 1st Birthday, so here’s a personal favourite. This was the first time a choir and soloists had been added to a ‘symphony’. Choral and orchestral music had been combined before but at the time there were quite rigid expectations of what a ‘symphony’ should be. That said there was a fascination amongst some parts of the Viennese audience with the way Ludwig van Beethoven seemed to be frequently tearing down traditions and replacing them with what somehow very often se...

On the day this episode is released, the American composer Philip Glass celebrates his 89th birthday. In a career now lasting well over five decades he has somehow achieved two extraordinarily rare things for a contemporary composer of classical music... a prolific amount of creative output and a degree of broad popularity. For the next hour and a quarter please enjoy a quick survey of five decades of great music… films, operas, concertos, quartets… and an unfairly small section of solo piano mu...

Antonio Salieri was born near Verona in 1750 but lived most of his life in Vienna. And in the 1780s he was possibly the most successful composer in Europe… writing the music for over forty operas. Later in life he taught Schubert and Liszt. He worked with Beaumarchais and da Ponte, and Goethe was a fan. But if today the name Salieri is even vaguely familiar… it is not because of his music… it is because of a rumour implicating him in the death at a young age of another Vienna-based composer. Tim...

The title of this episode is perhaps a little misleading and it certainly contains a contradiction… namely, if I have a recording, and I can play it to you, then really, is ‘forgotten’ the right adjective? But it is, I hope you’ll agree, a little catchier than… ‘music from Antonio Vivaldi that might get a bit more prominence if his set of solo violin concertos called ‘The Four Seasons’ wasn’t so extremely popular’. And as we go along, I’ll tell you a little about the remarkable journey of Vivald...

From playing piano in the waterfront bars of Hamburg in his teens, through the failed premiere of his first Piano Concerto, his fortuitous friendship with Clara & Robert Schumann, reviving the String Sextet… to writing a Requiem more about the living than the dead; Johannes Brahms created incredible music well before he became a grand old man of the nineteenth century symphony. Performances by Serkin, Szell, Cleveland, Amadeus Quartet, Ugorsky, Ashkenazy, Perlman, Tuckwell, Eschenbach, Klemperer...

In recent years music written by women has at long last begun to be commissioned, programmed, performed, recorded, discussed, reviewed, studied, and celebrated. And of course, most importantly, composed… in greater and greater quantities. Last time I checked women account for half the planet’s human population and if this podcast is called ‘Classical For Everyone’ then perhaps the music should be from ‘everyone'. And even though I’ve scattered some wonderful music written by women through earlie...

At the end of the last episode Georg Friedrich Handel had just composed the anthem ‘Zadok The Priest’ for the coronation of King George II of Great Britain. The year was 1727 and it was the same year that Handel; who had grown up and begun his career in what is now Germany, and who had spent an intensely formative four years in the city states of the Italian peninsula, was granted British citizenship. In the next three decades he would write another dozen operas, over twenty oratorios, a slew of...

I hope you’re in the mood for some truly beautiful music… much of it involving singing. I don’t know if I can convert anyone to the delights of early 18th century opera but the songs I’m going to play you in this episode are I think some of the most exquisite ever written. Handel was born in 1685 in Halle near Leipzig in what is now north-eastern Germany and died in London in 1759. By the time he died he was not just the most successful composer in Great Britain… he was one of the most successfu...

On January 27th 1786 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart turned 30. He had already written an astonishing amount of music of an incredible standard. He had been happily married to Constanze Weber for three years and their son Karl Thomas was fifteen months old. After moving to Vienna from Salzburg in 1781; Mozart had by 1786 reached perhaps the most economically secure position he would ever have. Essentially he was an in-demand freelance performer / composer with an emphasis on keyboard works and a growing...

Benjamin Britten is today perhaps best known for his operas which included ‘Peter Grimes’, ‘The Turn of The Screw’, ‘Billy Budd’ and ‘Death In Venice’. But I am actually going to feature more of his orchestral work in this episode. There’ll be a bit of singing today but I’m going to save up his operas for another time. You’ll hear some of his Violin Concerto, Simple Symphony, Ceremony of Carols, Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, War Requiem, Young Persons Guide To The Orchestra... and the in...

I am being a little deliberately opaque with the title of this episode. There is a certain logic to letting people know what they are going to get. But not today. Because I am hoping that for a good selection of listeners out there the date of 22nd December 1808 is pretty much meaningless. And that what follows will be a bit of a surprise. What happened? Well I guess a lot happened but for our purposes there was a concert. A thirty-eight year old composer, with the help of some aristocratic patr...

The second of a two episode special. His music uniquely blended Western European compositional techniques with distinctly Russian melodic and harmonic elements, creating a style that was both internationally appealing and unmistakably Russian. Remarkably successful in his own lifetime and responsible for so much music that remains popular to this day he is still perhaps not quite given his due. In these two episodes Sleeping Beauties, Memories of Beloved Places, Teasing Peasants, Violins, Pianos...

The first of a two episode special. His music uniquely blended Western European compositional techniques with distinctly Russian melodic and harmonic elements, creating a style that was both internationally appealing and unmistakably Russian. Remarkably successful in his own lifetime and responsible for so much music that remains popular to this day he is still perhaps not quite given his due. In these two episodes Sleeping Beauties, Memories of Beloved Places, Teasing Peasants, Violins, Pianos ...

You could take almost any year of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s life, probably from the age of fifteen onwards and be staggered by both the scale of his output… AND the quality… but his final year… 1791.. was a truly astonishing achievement… including his 27th piano concerto, his 6th string quintet, his clarinet concerto, two complete operas in wildly contrasting genres… ‘La Clemenza di Tito’ and ‘The Magic Flute’, and an unfinished Requiem Mass. And here is a link to an extended playlis...

Ludwig van Beethoven arrived in Vienna in late 1792 as a 22-year-old from the town of Bonn to study with Josef Haydn who was at the time undeniably Europe's most celebrated living composer. Beethoven also quickly established himself in Viennese aristocratic circles, securing patronage from nobles who recognized his extraordinary talent both as a virtuoso pianist and as a composer of startling originality. This episode is a collection of music from Beethoven’s first decade in Vienna. And here ...