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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

Debussy and Ravel are often described as the prototypical musical impressionists. It is often said that the two composers are the closest equivalents to the artistic world of Monet, Renoir, Pisarro, Degas, and others. But both Ravel and Debussy (like Monet for that matter), vehemently rejected the term Impressionism, and they both felt that they were striking out on their own individual paths in their msuic. That didn’t stop the public and critics from constantly comparing the music of these two shining lights of French music, despite the fact that Ravel and Debussy are actually quite different. Comparing Ravel and Debussy is a bit like comparing Haydn and Mozart. At first glance, there are many similarities, but if you look and listen more closely, Ravel and Debussy(like Mozart and Haydn) had totally different approaches, goals, and styles.
 
All of the constant comparisons and attempts at making the composers compete with each other had a real impact on Debussy and Ravel. Initially they were friends and mutual admirers of each others work, but they slowly drifted apart over time until they stopped speaking to each other altogether. We’ll talk about this complicated personal relationship, as well as looking at these differences in their music, not from a critical standpoint, but from the perspective of bringing out what is so wonderfully unique about their music. We’ll also talk about Ravel’s arrangements of two Debussy’s greatest orchestral works: his two piano arrangement of Debussy’s Nocturnes, and his piano 4 hands arrangement of the legendary Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Join us on another collaboration with G Henle Publishers!
 
Recordings:
 
Nocturnes
 
Claudio Abbado with London Symphony
 Anne Shasby, Richard McMahon, Piano
 
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
 
Ravel arrangement: Jean-Pierre Armengaud and Olivier Chauzu
 Debussy Arrangement: Charles Badami and Anthony Olson

Best of Frenemies: Debussy and Ravel

Bartok did not have an easy life in the US, and he was constantly both homesick and horrorstruck by the news from across the ocean. The final three movements of his Concerto for Orchestra display some of that heartbreak, but also the life-affirming joy that Bartok found in his final creative resurgence. Today we’ll talk about the devastating 3rd movement, the odd fourth movement, a movement that is playful, heartbreaking, and satirical all at once, and finally we’ll explore the ecstatic final movement.

Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, Part 2

Bartok’s Music for Strings Percussion and Celeste is a perfect encapsulation of Bartok’s musical output. Each movement provides us with a magnifying glass into some of the qualities that made Bartok one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. But for how spectacular a piece it is, it isn’t played as often as it should be, partly because of its extreme difficulty. Today, I’m going to talk you through what is perhaps Bartok's greatest piece, the unforgettable Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste.

Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste

Maurice Ravel the Magician, the Swiss Watchmaker, the aloof, the elegant, the precise, the soulful, the childlike, the naive, the warm, the radical, the progressive. These are all words that were used to describe a man of elegant contradictions throughout his life and into today. I talked a lot about Ravel’s skill with orchestration last week when we discussed Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, but Ravel's brilliance and creativity in terms of orchestral sound is absolutely unparalleled in musical history. But Ravel is somebody I’ve very rarely covered on the show, partly because he didn’t write very many large scale works that would cover a whole hour long episode. Well, it took 6 years for me to figure it out, but I realized a little while ago that I could cover two of Ravel’s shorter pieces and put them together on a double bill, so to speak. So today I’m going to tell you about Ravel’s most beloved and most despised piece, Bolero, and about my favorite piece of Ravel’s, La Valse. These are two pieces that could not be more different in their aims, in their constructions, and in their impacts on the audience. They are both thrillingly exciting, but in completely different ways. A good performance of Bolero should make you want to jump out of your seat with excitement, while a good performance of La Valse should terrify you to your core. Join us to learn all about it!

Ravel, Bolero + La Valse

Today is a bit of an unusual episode. Last month I was invited by the British Society of Aesthetics to address their annual conference. My task was to give a lecture on whatever topic I wanted, having to do with music. So, considering it was an Academic Philosophy conference, I chose the easiest and most straightforward topic possible - What Does Music Mean? 
 
Obviously, this is a topic that has been interrogated from just about every different angle, and I certainly would never claim to have all the answers. But for my lecture, I decided to focus on how to find meaning in these amazing works from a performer's perspective. How do I study and learn these pieces so that I can find the meaning that I think is inside of them? What does history teach us about these pieces and can we use history to find meaning in these works? To try to answer these questions I chose three pieces to explore - Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, Barber's Adagio for Strings, and Shostakovich's 5th Symphony. After the lecture I realized it could easily be a podcast episode, so I've slightly changed a few things to make the lecture a bit more podcast-friendly. I hope you enjoy this one, and thanks to the British Society of Aesthetics for their invitation and their warm welcome!

What Does Music Mean?

Here are two statements by Dmitri Shostakovich about the same piece, the 8th symphony that we are talking about today:
 
Statement No. 1, Shostakovich’s published comments about the symphony when it was first performed in 1943: The 8th Symphony reflects my…elevated creative mood, influenced by the joyful news of the Red Army's victories….
 "The Eighth Symphony contains tragic and dramatic inner conflicts. But on the whole it is optimistic and life-asserting. The first movement is a long adagio, with a dramatically tense climax. The second movement is a march, with scherzo elements, and the third is a dynamic march. The fourth movement, in spite of its march form, is sad in mood. The fifth and final movement is bright and gay, like a pastoral, with dance elements and folk motifs.
 "The philosophical conception of my new work can be summed up in these words: life is beautiful. All that is dark and evil rots away, and beauty triumphs."
 
Statement No. 2, from the disputed book Testimony, published in the 1970s: ‘And then the war came and the sorrow became a common one. We could talk about it, we could cry openly, cry for our lost ones. People stopped fearing tears. Before the war there probably wasn’t a single family who hadn’t lost someone, a father, a brother, or if not a relative, then a close friend. Everyone had someone to cry over, but you had to cry silently, under the blanket, so no one would see. Everyone feared everyone else, and the sorrow oppressed and suffocated us. It suffocated me too. I had to write about it. I had to write a Requiem for all those who died, who had suffered. I had to describe the horrible extermination machine and express protest against it. The Seventh and Eighth Symphonies are my Requiems.
 
I don’t know of a more profound example of Shostakovich’s doublespeak, or of his ability to make diametrically opposing statements about the meaning behind his music. Shostakovich’s 8th symphony premiered at the height of World War II, and it was not a hit, unlike his 7th symphony which had swept the world with its seeming patriotic fervor and its devastating condemnation of the Nazis. Shostakovich’s 8th is a very different piece, darker, edgier, less catchy, less simple, and certainly less optimistic. It was panned in the Soviet Union by the official critics and was effectively banned from performance in teh Soviet Union from 1948 until the late 1950s. It was also not particularly popular outside of the Soviet Union, as the 7th’s popularity and accessibility dwarfed the 8th, though this equation has now flipped, with the 8th symphony now probably becoming slightly more often played than the 7th. As always with Shostakovich, he mixes tradition with his own Shostakovich-ian innovations. The symphony has a Sonata Form first movement, but that movement is longer than the following three movements combined. It has a darkness to light theme from C Minor to C Major, like in Beethoven’s 5th and Mahler’s 2nd, but whether the ending is optimistic is subject to furious debate. It has not 1 but 2 scherzos, but they are among the least funny scherzos ever written, and it has a slow movement that is surprisingly un-emotional. The requiem Shostakovich speaks of seems to happen slowly over the course of this 1 hour symphony. It is perhaps Shostakovich’s most ambiguous mature symphony, and it is also thought of as one of his greatest masterpieces. Today on this Patreon Sponsored episode, we’ll dive into this remarkable work, trying to create a framework to understand this huge and demanding symphony. Join us!

Shostakovich Symphony No. 8

I'm so happy to share this live episode of Sticky Notes that I did with the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra in Denmark back in October! This episode covered Berlioz's remarkable Symphonie Fantastique - the ultimate symphonic thrill ride. Join the orchestra and I as we talk our way through this symphony, from it's opium fueled back story, to its innovative structure and style, to the dreams and reveries of the first movement and the sadistic glee of the final two movements, and a whole lot more. Thank you to the Aalborg Symphony for their participation in this project, and I hope all of you listening have had a wonderful holidays and a Happy New Year! See you in the New Year with all new episodes from Beethoven's Opus 135 String Quartet to Smetana's Ma Vlast and much much more!

Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique LIVE w/ The Aalborg Symphony

There is nothing like hearing a Late Beethoven String Quartet for the first time. Beethoven’s late string quartets, Op. 127, Op. 130, Op. 131, Op. 132, and Op. 135, are among the 5 greatest pieces of music ever written for any combination of instruments. They reach a kind of cosmic understanding of the world that is unparalleled, and they remain the Mount Everest of every string quartet’s repertoire. The quartet we’re going to be talking about today, Op. 135, is slightly the outlier from the set, in that it is less expansive, slightly less complex, and as Misha Amory from the Brentano String Quartet says, “it is the work of a composer who seems to have suddenly attained some new, simple truth after miles of struggle.” Op. 135 is Beethoven’s last completed work, and as this year begins, I thought I would check off number 2 of 5 Late Beethoven Quartets with this work that seems to exist on another plane of existence entirely. It is a piece of great depth and sadness, and also of ecstasy and lightness. It is a piece of great seriousness that is also full of a sense of humor that is rare in Beethoven. It contains one of the greatest slow movements ever written, a movement that would inspire one of Mahler’s greatest symphonic movements, and it also features a zany and wild scherzo movement that could have been written two weeks ago. In short, Beethoven’s Op. 135 has it all. Join us as we go through this masterpiece together!

Beethoven String Quartet, Op. 135

In the early 1930s, at the height of the atonal and twelve tone movement in music, the American violinist Louis Krasner commissioned a concerto from the Viennese Composer Alban Berg. Berg declined at first, saying that his idiom was not appropriate to a concerto and that he did not belong in the world of Wienawski and Vieuxtemps, two relatively obscure composers nowadays who wrote virtuoso showpieces for the violin that are very exciting but not particularly deep on a musical level. Krasner countered with the Beethoven and Brahms’ violin concertos, which, frankly, is a pretty great argument! Krasner was convinced that Berg was the vessel through which 12 tone/serial music could reach, as the great writer Michael Sternberg called it, “it’s expressive potential.” The 12 tone/serial technique of writing music was still controversial at the time(and it remains that way now), with many composers and performers embracing atonal music, with others, especially audiences, turning away. Berg finally accepted the commission, and despite his normal slow pace of composing, wrote the concerto in just a few months. The piece fulfilled Krasner’s expectations, and more, and it has become almost a standard repertoire piece for violinists. It is in the twelve tone style, but it is also in many ways a fundamentally tonal piece, and the way that Berg passes through atonality to tonality and back again makes this concerto accessible in a way that many other atonal works are not at first hearing. Today on this Patreon and Fundraiser inspired show, we’re going to go through this concerto, first by starting with a crash course in 12 tone music. Then we’ll walk our way through this concerto, talking about tone rows, tonality within tone rows, Carinthian folk songs, life and death, Manon Gropius, Alma Mahler, Bach, and the memory of angels. All of this is contained inside of this remarkable piece, and we’ll talk all about it, and more. Join us!

Berg Violin Concerto

Nationalism, patriotism, cultural identity, a sense of home; these are concepts and ideas whose popularity have ebbed and flowed throughout history. Nationalism has been seen as a natural expression of cultural identity and pride, and it also has been at the core of virulent racism and xenophobia. Patriotism has been used as a cudgel by all sides of the political spectrum for good and evil, and a sense of home has led to cultural explosions and also to some of the bloodiest wars of all time. For Bedrich Smetana, these concepts were extremely multi-layered. He was a proud Bohemian nationalist for much of his life, but he also barely spoke Czech(German was the lingua franca among educated classes in Prague), and he was also disenchanted with the Prague musical establishment due to their cool reception of his Wagnerian/Lisztian style. He even left Prague for a time to work in Gothenburg Sweden, writing curtly to his parents: “Prague did not wish to acknowledge me, so I left it.” But only 6 years later, he wrote again to a friend: "My home has rooted itself into my heart so much that only there do I find real contentment. It is to this that I will sacrifice myself." Stirred to patriotic and nationalistic sentiments, Smetana began studying the Czech language in earnest, and his second opera, The Bartered Bride, became the first Czech opera to enter the mainstream repertoire around Europe. It was a piece fully in Czech style, and even though Smetana battled to the end of his life with different members of the Prague musical establishment, he is still thought of today as the founder of the Czech national sound. This is even before we begin talking about the topic for today, Ma Vlast, which is commonly translated to My Fatherland, My Country, or My Homeland. Ma Vlast is a massive, nearly hour and a half long work that amalgamates Wagnerian and Listzian ideas of a tone poem along with nationalistic music that has stirred not only the Czech soul but the souls of people all around the world. As Semyon Bychkov, the great Russian conductor and current Music Director of the Czech Philharmonic says: “The core subject of this piece is home and the meaning of home; everything else is the gravy.” Today on the show we’ll begin by talking about Smetana’s tragic experience of deafness, and then we’ll go through each movement of his huge piece, talking about the msuic from the perspecitve of nationalism and also Wagnerian ideas of leitmotifs as well as orchestration and style. Join us!
 
Recording: Czech Philharmonic conducted by Rafael Kubelik

Smetana: Ma Vlast

Symphonie Fantastique, which was written just 3 years after Beethoven’s death, redefined what music could portray. Its color, fire, narrative arc, vulgarity, descriptiveness, and drug-induced hysteria put it in a class of its own in the classical music world. As Leonard Bernstein said: "Berlioz tells it like it is. You take a trip, you wind up screaming at your own funeral.” Today we’ll get to know the story behind Symphonie Fantastique, and also talk about this piece and all of its brilliant innovations.

Berlioz, "Symphonie Fantastique"

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