Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

• The Life and Music of Grazyna Bacewicz

  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!

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• Sticky Notes meets You'll Hear It

  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!  

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• Impressions in Blue: Ravel & Gershwin

  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!  

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

  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! 

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• Beethoven Piano Sonata in B♭ major, Op. 106, "Hammerklavier" - Part 1

  Beethoven once wrote to his publisher: “What is difficult, is also beautiful, good, great, and so forth. Hence everyone will realize that this is the most lavish praise that can be bestowed, since what is difficult makes one sweat.” If this credo manifests itself most powerfully in any one of Beethoven’s works, it might be the piece we’ll talk about today, the piano Sonata Op. 106, nicknamed, “Hammerklavier.”  It is the longest Sonata Beethoven ever wrote, which essentially means that it was the longest sonata anyone had written up to that point. It marks one of the pivot points between Beethoven’s so-called heroic period and his late period, where his music became even more cosmically beautiful than before. It is certainly his most ambitious Sonata to that point, and his most difficult. The scale of the Hammerklavier sonata is hard to describe; in around 45 minutes of music, Beethoven explores the full gamut of human emotion. The intensity, the difficulty, and the concentration that this sonata requires from the pianist and listener alike has led to many people, as the pianist Andras Schiff says, to “respect and revere this Sonata, but not love it.” Most of the articles and analyses of this sonata that I found in researching this show emphasize its difficulty, its scale, its obsessiveness, and its impenetrability. But I must say that when I talk to musicians abut this piece, their eyes light up. Yes, this sonata is difficult, but what have we just learned from Beethoven? What is difficult is also beautiful, good, great and so forth. Join us as we begin a two part exploration of this remarkable work together.  Thank you to Jerry for sponsoring this show on Patreon! Recording: https://youtu.be/yBtJF_4msqw?si=bIznKSGuRyXDbFaT    

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