Classical For Everyone

A podcast about classical music is maybe not really a place for politics but I'm recording this episode a day after the midterm elections in the US. And I think that a lot of people all over the globe are pleased and perhaps relieved that the complicated machinery of democracy in 2026 was robust enough to survive various attempts to compromise or subvert it… and regardless of one's affiliations I think that is well worth celebrating. With some help from Aaron Copland, Jennifer Higdon, Leonard Bernstein, Joan Tower, George Gershwin, Phillip Glass and John Adams.
[Episode Image: Scaffolding Liberty]

The pianist Sviatoslav Richter's life can somewhat conveniently be broken up into two parts… before he was allowed to tour outside the Soviet bloc in 1960 when he was in his mid 40s… and after. This episode is mostly about that second part; and touches on Richter's expanded interest in Chamber Music, some famous recordings, his influence on piano repertoire and his later career. Plus there will be sensational music from Schumann, Schubert, Liszt, Mozart, Beethoven and Prokofiev.
[Episode Image: Richter c.1960s – photographer: Arje Plas]

We bring meanings to music that the composers often didn't intend. And this episode is going to be an example of that. There is something in some music that for me triggers a sort of longing. The writer and composer Jan Swafford describes some of Mozart's music as having a 'deep yearning' and I think that is in the same general area.  And you can't be too prescriptive about this. It is a bit different if there are lyrics but music on its own is generally suggestive rather than specific. And when I describe the music I'm going to play as inspiring feelings of 'longing'… that in itself is a broad and perhaps vague concept… the music might bring up feelings of someone you have lost… or of a place you can't return to… maybe a golden time you can't recapture… or an ache for someone you can't be with.
And of course it may do none of those things for you but for the next hour and a bit there will be music with maybe a hint of melancholy or wistfulness or searching or longing… from Frederic Chopin, Maurice Ravel, Gabriel Fauré, Edward Elgar, Anton Arensky, Jean Sibelius, Arvo Pärt, Johann Sebastain Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Aram Khachaturian and Ludwig van Beethoven. 
[Episode image: 'A distant star' Chania, Crete.]

The Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter, as I hope this and the following episode will illustrate, is one of the greatest musicians of the recording era… unsurpassed technical expertise matched with a profound depth of musicality. But those clichés (whilst true) could be applied to a not insignificant number of other players. So why Richter? More than most musicians he was touched by history.  Born in 1915 and dying in 1997, he outlived the Soviet Union but his life was utterly entangled with that state and the impact its leaders had on the people under their iron fists, Richter included. There is I think something in Richter's absolute immersion in his music that was a result of these extraordinary times and his strategies to protect himself from them. And along with the first part of his story there will be music from Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Beethoven, Schubert and Rachmaninoff.
[Episode Image: Richter c.1960 Time Life - Walter Sanders]

Why Mozart Opera Overtures? Well, whilst they were not really intended to be stand-alone pieces they have in many instances become favourites of concert programmers and broadcasters, not to mention the public. And with most of them being about five minutes long you can fit eleven of them into a podcast episode! They are also in a way an interesting lens into the development of a composer… since Mozart wrote his first opera very early and completed two in the final year of his life. And in between he wrote another 15 to 20 operas depending on how you define them. So I'm going to play them in chronological order. And as a parallel they chart the changes in the make-up of a theatre orchestra in this time of intense development… the late 1760s to the early 1790s. What we think of as the modern orchestra was starting to settle at this time and the difference in the resources, in terms of instruments, Mozart had from the beginning of his career to the end is striking. And music is pretty damn sensational.
[Episode image: 'Cosi Fan Tutte' – Opera Australia.]