Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

The year is 1910. Imagine that you are a young composer, and the music world is in flux all around you. Mahler is dying, and with his death many agreed that the great Austro-German symphonic tradition...

Rimsky-Korsakov, above anything else, is regarded as a master of orchestration, the art of creating orchestral sound and color. As Rachmaninoff said about Rimsky-Korsakov's music: "When there is a sno...

In May of 1937, R. Nathaniel Dett's oratorio "The Ordering of Moses" was premiered by the Cincinnati Symphony. The performance was carried live on national radio by NBC, but about 3/4's of the way thr...

"I never really thought of them as walls. I thought of them more as boundaries. Walls are a much more serious matter. You're not supposed to be able to get through, while boundaries at least you can c...

Sibelius never gets mentioned on "most" lists, the most innovative, modernistic, romantic, beautiful, conservative, ugly, violent, peaceful etc. In fact, no one is ever sure where to put him on these ...

Last week I told you the story of the genesis of Shostakovich's 5th symphony. We talked politics, but we also talked about just the music itself. Today, I'll take you through the second half of the sy...

Shostakovich's life and career was so wrapped up with his relationship to the Soviet government that it is sometimes hard to appreciate that, all else aside, he was one of the great 20th century compo...

If you're not a violinist, you might not be familiar with the name Eugene Ysaye. But this violinist and composer was called "The King of the Violin" at the turn of the 20th century. Ysaye's biggest co...

This week, on part 2 of this look at Mahler 1, we're going to take a deep dive into the third and fourth movements of this massive and massively ambitious symphony. We'll talk about Frere Jacques, biz...

No one makes a grand statement quite like Gustav Mahler, and his first symphony, nearly an hour long, was one of the boldest statements ever made by a young composer. Today I'll take a look at the his...