Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

Nowadays it's hard to imagine Maurice Ravel as a "bad-boy" revolutionary, a member of a group whose name can be loosely translated as The Hooligans. To most listeners today, Ravel's music is the very ...

Longtime listeners of Sticky Notes know that Shostakovich's 10 symphony was the inaugural piece covered on the show. It's been 8 years(!) since that show, so I've totally re-written the episode and ha...

There are so many great apocryphal stories in the long history of classical music, from the reason Tchaikovsky wrote his Sixth Symphony to what famous composers supposedly said on their deathbeds, to ...

One of my favorite things about having Patreon sponsors is that they often suggest the most fascinating pieces and topics for shows. Adrian, who sponsored a show last year, gave me one of my favorite ...

The great Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski said this after the premature death of his contemporary Grazyna Bacewicz: "She was born with an incredible wealth of musical talent, which she succeeded to...

I had such a wonderful time joining the jazz podcast You'll Hear It! We talked about the meeting of jazz and classical music, a topic I've explored before, but never in this much depth and never with ...

In the mid-1920s, Maurice Ravel wrote a letter to the legendary composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. Boulanger's class was a mecca for composers, both young and old, and musicians from all over the wo...

There is a special category when it comes to Beethoven; a catalogue that doesn't include complete symphonies, sonatas, concerti, string quartets, etc., but just single movements. This is the catalogue...

Beethoven once wrote to his publisher: "What is difficult, is also beautiful, good, great, and so forth. Hence everyone will realize that this is the most lavish praise that can be bestowed, since wha...

The collaboration between Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht is rightly legendary. The two men could not have been more different from each other, and like the Brahms/Joachim relationship I mentioned in my...