Classical For Everyone

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 you music from a variety of genres, orchestral, opera, string quartet, choral and keyboard. The afterlife of Mozart's music is probably the most successful, or perhaps most fortunate, of all classical composers. So much of his music is still played, broadcast and recorded. But there is a pretty massive amount of amazing music that is not often heard and I think some of it will come up in this episode.

The name comes from the night of the week when for some of us, the frustrations of insomnia hit the hardest… and because my preferred antidote is getting lost in some music. Of course this series is for everyone… but it is perhaps intended a little more for those of you whose sleep has been troubled. The idea of the special is to play just one piece, uninterrupted and in its entirety… with a few minutes of background explained at the end of the episode. This month… Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3 – 'Symphony of Sorrowful Songs' from 1976. Performed by the London Sinfonietta conducted by David Zinman featuring the soprano, Dawn Upshaw.

Much of the 20th century orchestral music that today dominates concert halls and recording studios started as music for ballets. And the best of it started with the Ballets Russes company; which was largely the creation of one man… the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev. It is hard to think of another instance where one man, who was not a composer, has had such an outsize influence on what has come down to us as great and lasting music. And I'm going to play you a selection of that music… from Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Manuel de Falla and Sergei Prokofiev… as well as giving you a little of the Diaghilev and Ballets Russes story.

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 seemed to have been an innovation that was music's next natural step. And with the final movement of this symphony, Beethoven took that step. Suddenly there was singing.

If from time to time you happen to listen to a podcast with the subtitle 'Five Hundred Years Of incredible Music' then it would be a reasonable expectation to hear some five hundred year old music. I've played a few pieces from the 1500s and 1600s but as you might expect the focus of the show has been sort of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi onwards… call it from the early 1700s until today. That means I've left out a good 175 years of music. This episode is going to be a step toward redressing that neglect.