Five hundred years of incredible music. No expertise is necessary. All you need are ears. If you’ve ever been even slightly curious about classical music then t...
Farewells. Music for Partings, Journeys & Goodbyes.
This episode of Classical For Everyone includes musicians slowly leaving the stage… lovers separated by the call of duty… music for beginning a journey… and music for a sad and very final farewell. A section of a symphony by Josef Haydn, eight minutes of a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart opera, a Felix Mendelssohn overture, maybe one of the saddest farewells ever written… from Henry Purcell, and the Adagio For Strings by Samuel Barber.
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1:05:10
Not Dead Yet. Music from Living Composers.
This episode is all music written by people who have the particular distinction of still breathing. I think it’s important to say that nowhere near all classical music is written by dead men from Vienna. One of the unintended consequences of a whole genre of music being called ‘classical’ is that associations with past eras can disguise the fact that exciting and brilliant new music is being written and performed every day and here are works by Jennifer Higdon, John Adams, Gillian Whitehead, Ross Edwards and Brett Dean.
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1:00:21
Mini-episode: Why is some Classical Music so damn long?
There’s a string quartet written by the American composer Morton Feldman in the 1980s that is about 6 hours long. ‘Einstein on the Beach’, the opera by Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson, is about five hours long and is performed without an interval. There is of course plenty of classical music that is well under these eye-watering durations. A Vivaldi concerto can be over in ten minutes… Aaron Copland’s ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ is under four minutes and most Chopin Nocturnes are three to five minutes long. But there is still a perception and an understandable one… that classical music is long. And it is a quick leap to the conclusion that it is too long. Well, there might be another way of looking at it.
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14:49
Night… Classical music after the sun has set.
This episode of Classical For Everyone is all about Night.. music that evokes the night… that captures the different moods of nighttime, and music written to be performed at night. Night in the Gardens of Spain, Moonlight over the Suffolk Coast, Midnight in a Chapel, Goblins in the bedroom, a walk in a deep, dark forest at night… a Nocturne… and a little night music. Sixty minutes of music by Manuel De Falla, Frederic Chopin, Benjamin Britten, Marc-Antione Charpentier, Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
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1:02:51
An Introduction to the Podcast… with a little music.
Maybe the place to start... An eight-minute overview of the podcast including some unfairly brief excerpts from music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Dmitri Shostakovich, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Adams, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George Gershwin and Ross Edwards.
Five hundred years of incredible music. No expertise is necessary. All you need are ears. If you’ve ever been even slightly curious about classical music then this is the podcast for you.
New Zealand