This Week at The Classical Station
by Chrissy Keuper & Mark Schreiner
Saturday and Sunday, 31 January & 1 February, 2026
It’s the weekend and we’re filling it with gorgeous music, as usual. Join us!
Here are some highlights:
Saturdays are on point with great ballet music and at 1pmET on Saturday On Point, we’ll experience Gayane, a lively and dramatic four-act ballet first created by artists determined to create art amid the calamity of World War II. After a few months’ effort, Aram Khachaturian’s work reached the stage on December 3, 1942. It was a particularly small stage — one in a tiny theater in Perm, a sleepless military-industrial city in the heart of Siberia. Even in those conditions, the effect on the wartime audience was reportedly profound. The performance proved that art, and the joy it can bring, cannot be extinguished.
And at 6pmET, we have more of your requests and dedications on the Saturday Evening Request Program. Tune in to hear all the favorites of your fellow listeners!
You won’t want to miss Sunday morning’s music, which will feature a major choral work by Johannes Brahms: He completed Nänie, Op. 82, or the Song of Lamentation, in 1881 as a way to honor his dead friend, the painter Anselm Feuerbach. For the text, he chose a funereal poem by Schiller filled with references to Greek mythology. Among the heartbreaking verses is a lamentation that “even beauty must die.”
You’ll also hear Bach’s Cantata BWV 14, Wär Gott nicht mit uns diese Zeit (Were God not with us at this time), which was first performed in Leipzig on January 30, 1735, for the fourth Sunday after Epiphany. Great Sacred Music begins at 8amET, right after Sing For Joy.
And at 6pmET, Preview! brings you new and recent releases from the classical music world. This week, the Ariel Quartet performs Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 4 in C Minor, Op. 18. Plus, we’ll hear the Neave Trio in an ICMA-nominated performance of Cecile Chaminade’s Piano Trio No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 11.
Monday, 26 January 2026
Welcome to a brand new week of great classical music, Listeners!
Listen here, and please support this wonderful art form by donating here.
We thank you for all of your support since 1978!
This evening, join Vince Tillona at 7pmET for Drop the Needle and another deep dive into The Classical Station’s vinyl collection with “The Evolution of an Overture”: A much-admired 1967 recording (Columbia Masterworks – MS 7068) of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Leonore Overtures.
Vince will have the first three of these Romantic Period works as performed by the Cleveland Orchestra at the height of its powers, under the direction of George Szell.
And at 8pmET on Monday Night at the Symphony, we’ll spend some time with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, a diverse ensemble that has deeply enriched the cultural life of that nation and our world since 1965.
Over the decades, the ensemble has been directed by a succession of prominent conductors, including Herbert Blomstedt, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Yevgeny Svetlanov and Manfred Honeck.
Tomorrow, George Leef honors Classical Café’s weekly Legendary Performer:
Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons.
And on Wednesday, George will give away not one, not two, but a four-pack of tickets to see and hear The Vienna Boys Choir (Die Wiener Sängerknaben) in Burlington, NC, on Friday, February 27.
Tune in to win tickets to see one of the world’s foremost choirs, in existence for more than 520 years.