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Joshua Weilerstein

Sticky Notes is a classical music podcast for everyone, whether you are just getting interested in classical music for the first time, or if you've been listening to it and loving it all your life.  Interviews with great artists, in depth looks at pieces in the repertoire, and both basic and deep dives into every era of music.  Classical music is absolutely for everyone, so let's start listening!  Note - Seasons 1-5 will be returning over the next year. They have been taken down in order to be re-recorded in improved sound quality!

Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

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 my favorite story: how Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 96, The Miracle, got its name.
 
Apparently, during the premiere of the symphony, a chandelier fell, but miraculously didn’t hit anyone. Hence, The Miracle Symphony. The chandelier did, in fact, fall, but we now know it happened during the premiere of Haydn’s Symphony No. 102, which has no nickname. Coincidentally, or perhaps not so coincidentally, the 96th Symphony is performed far more often than the 102nd, likely because of its nickname, even though it’s the nickname of the wrong symphony.
 
The Barber Violin Concerto has a great and true story behind it. But before certain information was revealed in 2010, the story everyone knew was quite different. The original version goes like this: Barber had completed the first two movements of his Violin Concerto and sent them to the soloist scheduled to premiere the work, Iso Briselli. Briselli didn’t like the concerto, claiming it wasn’t virtuosic enough, and asked Barber to write something more difficult.
 
Barber, perhaps with an evil laugh, obliged and returned with the third movement. When Briselli received it, he realized he couldn’t play it because of its extreme difficulty and ultimately withdrew from the premiere, which instead went to violinist Albert Spalding. It’s a perfect “Icarus flying too close to the sun” kind of classical music story, but as it turns out, it isn’t the full story.
 
In 2010, letters were released between Barber, Briselli, and the real instigator in this little operetta, Briselli’s violin teacher, Albert Meiff. I’ll get into the whole story later, but it’s a good one, even if it’s not quite as cinematic as the legend.
 
More important than the dispute over its last movement is the remarkable beauty and creativity of this masterful 20th-century concerto. Barber’s Violin Concerto is one of my favorite pieces to play and to conduct, and it has charmed audiences ever since its premiere. It features Americana music of a kind only Copland could equal, as well as a heartbreaking oboe solo that might be one of the greatest moments in the history of American classical music.
 
And then there’s that pesky third movement, a challenge to every violinist (and orchestra) and a movement that remains controversial for many reasons.

Barber Violin Concerto

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 prompts when he suggested looking at works based on literature. Now he’s sponsored another episode, this time with an equally compelling idea that I was eager to explore right away. His prompt was:
 
“The evolution of conducting techniques throughout recorded history. How have innovations from great conductors changed how music is performed and understood?”
 
As a conductor, the thought of diving into different recordings of a single piece naturally whets my appetite. But the real reason I was so excited about this episode is that interpretation is, in my view, wildly misunderstood. I’ve tried to tackle this idea in many different ways, in my episode about the sound of the violin with Soovin Kim and my dad, Donald Weilerstein; in my “What Does Music Mean?” episode; and even in “What Does a Conductor Really Do?” But I’ve never taken a single piece and focused solely on its interpretation, and on how that interpretation has changed over time.
 
This gives us the chance to dig deeply into what makes an interpretation. So today, I’m going to share a set of recordings of one piece (and don’t worry, I’ll reveal which one in a moment). I’ll talk about what sets them apart, both the obvious differences, like pitch and extremes of tempo, and the more subtle ones, like vibrato, phrasing, and other elements of performance that most listeners aren’t trained to notice.
 
So, let’s do some exploring together, coming right up, on Sticky Notes.

100 Years of Beethoven's Eroica (recordings)

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 bring to full flourish through an almost fanatical zeal and unwavering faith in her mission. The intensity of her activities was so great that she managed, in a cruelly-shortened life, to give birth to such treasures that any composer of her stature with a considerably longer life span could only envy.” Bacewicz is a name that is probably not that familiar to you, but during her lifetime she was an extremely popular composer in her native Poland and across Europe as well. In the United States, her music has been rarely performed, though this has started to shift thanks to a renewed interest in female composers of the past. This new look at Bacewicz has revealed an incredible wealth of music. Bacewicz was one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century, writing over 200 works during her short lifetime! Some call her style neo-classical, but the main thing that I hear in her music is a sharp originality that permeates her music and makes her compositions a thrill to listen to. The vitality, energy, and creativity that embodies Bacewicz’s works will be the main part of the show today, as we’ll go through a set of some of her most representative pieces, pieces that I hope will enter the standard repertoire of performers all over the world even more so than they already have. So join me today to explore the life and music of this unfamiliar but vital 20th century master!

The Life and Music of Grazyna Bacewicz

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 so much input from jazz musicians and experts like Peter Martin and Adam Maness. We talk about great jazz and classical composers, but we also talk about the strange divide between jazz musicians and classical musicians, trying to break down the barriers that exist between purveyors of these wonderful genres of music. I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I did!

Sticky Notes meets You'll Hear It

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 world vied to study with her. But Ravel’s letter wasn’t on his own behalf. Instead, he urged Boulanger to take on a young student whom Ravel himself had declined to teach. He wrote:
 
"There is a musician here endowed with the most brilliant, most enchanting, and perhaps the most profound talent: George Gershwin. His worldwide success no longer satisfies him, for he is aiming higher. He knows that he lacks the technical means to achieve his goal. In teaching him those means, one might ruin his talent. Would you have the courage, which I wouldn’t dare have, to undertake this awesome responsibility?"
 
Boulanger also declined to take Gershwin as a student, fearing, like Ravel, that she might damage his spontaneity and dynamic jazz sensibility. Whether or not the famous story is true (that Ravel turned down Gershwin’s request to study with him by saying, “Why be a second-rate Ravel when you are a first-rate Gershwin?”) we may never know. But the two composers were friendly, and formed something of a mutual admiration society.
 
Today, in this fourth collaboration with G. Henle Publishers in honor of their Ravel and Friends project, we’re going to explore the connections between these two great composers: their friendship, their mutual influence, and the profound ways jazz infused itself into Ravel’s music, particularly in his Violin Sonata and Piano Concerto in G. From the moment he discovered it, Ravel adored jazz, and like many French composers of the time, allowed its influence to permeate his work in ways both explicit and subtle. Join us!

Impressions in Blue: Ravel & Gershwin

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 of great Beethoven slow movements. Beethoven’s slow movements are like a great Tolstoy novel. They span the gamut of human experience and also reach beyond it, into something we cannot understand but all somehow perceive. Simply put, Beethoven often seems to know us better than we know ourselves. This brings me to the slow movement of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata. Unlike those late quartet slow movements, the slow movement of the Hammerklavier is not about ecstatic contemplation. Instead, it is a movement of pure and profound despair. It has been described as “a mausoleum of the collective suffering of the world,” and “the apotheosis of pain, of that deep sorrow for which there is no remedy, and which finds expression not in passionate outpourings, but in the immeasurable stillness of utter woe.” This is not a movement I would necessarily enter into lightly as you go about your day—it requires you to take a moment and enter a world unlike any other.
 
Today, in Part 2 of this Patreon-sponsored exploration of this great, in all senses of the word, Sonata, we’ll go through this slow movement in detail. Then we’ll tackle the life-affirming and maddeningly complex last movement, which is not quite the antidote to the slow movement, but perhaps it is the only possible answer to the questions the third movement so profoundly asks. Join us!

Beethoven Piano Sonata in B Flat Major, Op. 106, "Hammerklavier" - Part 2

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 recent show about the Brahms Double concerto, the friendship between Weill and Brecht was stormy to say the least. The two collaborated on some of the most memorable works of the Weimar era in Germany, such as the Threepenny Opera, which features a pretty famous tune called Mack the Knife.
 
Their final collaboration was on the “sung ballet” The Seven Deadly Sins. This is a piece that was written at a point of remarkably high tension within Weimar Germany. On an artistic level, the 1920s and early 1930s had seen a veritable explosion in the world of culture, with art, dance, theater, and music all featuring artists who were pushing the boundaries with wild experimentation and a kind of ecstatic fervor that produced some of the world’s greatest and most memorable cultural achievements. On a parallel track however, the rise of the Nazis cast a pall over all of this. By 1933, both Brecht and Weill(who was Jewish) knew that Germany was not a place that they could stay safely. Weill ended up in Paris and then in the US for the rest of his life, while Brecht bounced around Europe before returning to East Germany after the war, hoping to be a part of the Marxist Utopia that he believed had been founded there. The simmering combination of Weill’s mastery of transforming popular forms into a unique kind of classical music along with Brecht’s pointed satire and brilliantly inventive libretti resulted in the Seven Deadly Sins, a piece that that brutally satirizes extreme capitalism and the degradation of the human soul that supposedly results from it. This is a nakedly political piece, and I should make it clear that by talking about it, by choosing to feature it on the show, and by regularly performing it, I don’t necessarily endorse its views. Brecht was extreme in all ways, as we’ll get to today, and the power of this piece in my opinion doesn’t come from its politics, but from its remarkable and devastating portrayal of a human soul and the tragedies that can befall it. This is one of my favorite pieces of the whole 20th century, and I’m so happy to share it with you today. Join us!

Weill: The Seven Deadly Sins

I so enjoyed making this latest episode in my collaboration with G Henle Publishers. I talked with two absolute experts in their fields, Norbert Mülleman and Stefan Knüpfer, all about how to edit Ravel's music, and how to create the Ravel sound on the piano. This episode definitely veers into some very nerdy territory, but Norbert and Stefan are both so brilliant at explaining very high level concepts in a way that anyone can understand, from a person who has never looked at a score to a professional performer. I think everyone will learn a lot from this episode and I don't think you'll ever hear Ravel the same way again after listening! Enjoy!

The Ravel Sound with Norbert Müllemann and Stefan Knüpfer

Admit it: if you're a fan of classical music—or even just a regular concertgoer—you might have glanced at the title of this episode and done a double take. The Dvořák Violin Concerto? Not the Cello Concerto?
 
One of the things I love about my job as a conductor—and my side gig as a podcast host—is bringing audiences and listeners like you pieces you may never have heard before, even if they're by extremely well-known composers. Don’t get me wrong, I love the blockbusters. But there’s a special thrill in introducing someone to something new.
 
Now, some of you might already be big fans of the Dvořák Violin Concerto. But in my experience, it’s relatively unknown compared to Dvořák’s more famous works. I’ve never performed it myself, and I’ve only heard it live once. It’s not part of most touring soloists’ repertoire, and it’s just one of those pieces that rarely comes up—especially compared to the Cello Concerto, which I think I’ve conducted at least once every season since becoming a conductor.
 
This concerto came about much like the Brahms Violin Concerto, the Brahms Double Concerto we talked about a couple of weeks ago, and so many other great 19th-century works: inspired by the sound of Joseph Joachim’s violin. Joachim was the great violinist of the 19th century and had been a friend and supporter of Dvořák for many years. Dvořák ended up dedicating the concerto to Joachim, writing: "I dedicate this work to the great Maestro Jos. Joachim, with the deepest respect, Ant. Dvořák."
 
Sadly—and for reasons that remain somewhat unclear—Joachim never performed the piece. That may be one of the reasons it’s never achieved the popularity it deserves.
 
Today, in this Patreon-sponsored episode, we’ll dive into the concerto, exploring its unusual form, the myriad challenges it poses for the violinist, and perhaps some reasons why it’s not part of the so-called “Big Five” violin concertos—even though it probably deserves to be.

Dvorak Violin Concerto

It’s entirely possible that we would not know the name of Johannes Brahms very well if Brahms hadn’t met Joseph Joachim as a very young man. Joachim, who was one of the greatest violinists of all time, had already established himself as touring soloist and recitalist, and he happened to know the musical power couple of Robert and Clara Schumann quite well. Joachim encouraged Brahms to go to Dusseldorf to meet the Schumann’s, and the rest is history. I’ve talked about the Brahms-Schumann relationship dozens of times on the show before, but to keep it very brief, Robert Schumann’s rhapsodic article Neue Bahnen(new paths) launched Brahms’ career, and until Schumann’s deterioration from mental illness he acted as a valued friend and mentor for Brahms. Clara Schumann, as a performer, was a powerful advocate for Brahms’ music as well as a devoted and loving friend throughout the rest of their lives. Almost constantly present in this relationship was the sound of Joseph Joachim’s violin. Brahms did not have a huge circle of friends, but for the often difficult to get along with composer, Joachim was a musical and spiritual companion. Brahms’ legendary violin concerto was written for him, and the two collaborated closely for the entire course of their musical lives, except for one significant break. Brahms and Joachim were estranged for 7 years, until Brahms reached out with a remarkable conciliatory gesture: a concerto for Violin and Cello and that would be dedicated to Joachim. Brahms and Joachim(as well as Brahms and Clara Schumann) had often resolved disputes through music, and this was no exception. Clara Schumann gleefully wrote in her diary after Joachim had read through the piece with cellist Robert Hausmann: "This concerto is a work of reconciliation - Joachim and Brahms have spoken to each other again for the first time in years.” One would expect that a work like this would be beloved, but the Double Concerto has had a checkered history, which we’ll also get into later. Clara herself wrote that it lacked "the warmth and freshness which are so often found to be in his works,” It would turn out to be Brahms’ last work for orchestra, and one of the few in his later style, which makes It fascinating to look at from a compositional perspective. Partly because of the cool reception it got in its first few performances, and the practical challenges of finding two spectacular soloists who can meet its challenges, the piece is not performed all that often, though I have always adored this piece and am very grateful to Avi who sponsored this week’s show from my fundraiser last year before the US election. So let’s dive into this gorgeous concerto, discussing the reasons for Joachim and Brahms’ break, their reconciliation, the reception this piece got, and then of course, the music itself! Join us!

Brahms Double Concerto

If you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall for a slightly nerdy conversation between a conductor and a composer who also happens to be a great writer and thinker about classical music, this week's show is for you! This is a wide-ranging, free-flowing conversation that covers the composition process, understanding Beethoven from a composer's perspective, the intimacy of Brahms, and the wackiness and earnestness of the music of Ives. I hope this hour will be as fun an escape for you as it was for me!

A Conversation with Jan Swafford, Composer and Author

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