This Week at The Classical Station
by Chrissy Keuper & Mark Schreiner
Saturday and Sunday, 14 & 15 February, 2026
This weekend:
It’s Valentine’s Day, so fill your home, car or wherever you are with Great Romantic Music for dancers on the stage! A perfect choice is the beautiful melodies of Daphnis et Chloé, Maurice Ravel’s symphonie chorégraphique of 1912. Saturday at 1 pmET, join host Peggy Powell for Saturday On Point and luscious melodies that illuminate the story of separated lovers who are finally brought together only through the intervention of the gods and the power of love.
At 6pmET, Haydn Jones has Valentine’s Day requests and dedications on the Saturday Evening Request Program.
On Sunday, join James Steelmon for Great Sacred Music and a performance of J.S. Bach’s Cantata BWV 144, Nimm, was dein ist, und gehe hin (Take what is yours and go away), written for the Septuagesimae (third Sunday before Lent) in 1724. In addition to a wonderful program of choral and orchestral music from many faith traditions, we’ll hear Arvo Pärt’s Berliner Messe. This setting of the Mass features his “tintinnabuli” (Latin for “ringing bells”) compositional style, which is characterized by the interplay of two tightly harmonized voices.
Your sacred Sunday starts at 8amET, right after Sing For Joy from St. Olaf College.
And at 6pmET, Seth Taylor will be with you for Preview! and some juicy new and recent releases in the classical music world, including two pieces rescued from oblivion:
J.S. Bach’s Concerto in C Minor, BWV 1060R (which was lost and reconstructed after Bach’s death), and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Fatum, Op. 77 (which Tchaikovsky tried very hard to destroy altogether).
Friday, 13 February 2026
Happy Friday, All!
We’re playing your requests and special dedications all day today for All-Request Friday (and we’ll do it again tomorrow night on the Saturday Evening Request Program).
Make your requests for next week right here.
On this day in Classical Music History:
Eileen Farrell, the celebrated American soprano, was born this day in Connecticut in 1920.
Eileen Farrell (right) with Bruno Bartoletti, 1959.
Over a nearly 60-year career, Farrell performed both classical and popular music to live audiences and, increasingly, to global audiences via radio, television, and in dozens of best-selling recordings. Watch as Farrell sings Un bel dî, vebremo on The Ed Sullivan Show.
She was known for her large and radiant soprano voice. One newspaper critic wrote that she was “to singers what Niagara is to waterfalls.”
The pinnacle of her career was five seasons with the Metropolitan Opera, 1960 to 1966. While she sang European repertoire (including the title role in Gluck’s Alcesta and Maddalena in Giordano’s Andrea Chénier) on the Manhattan stage, she continued to visit Columbia Records studios to make bestselling pops records (including albums entitled I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues and This Fling Called Love). Her duet with Frank Sinatra on Kris Kristofferson’s country music hit “For the Good Times,” released in 1979, was well received by fans and critics.
She taught extensively, including as a professor of music at Indiana University and the University of Maine. In her personal life, she married New York City policeman Robert Vincent Reagan and made a home with him on Staten Island. They had a son and a daughter. She died in 2002, aged 82.
Thursday, 12 February 2026
It’s Friday Eve, Listeners!
We’ll celebrate tonight with Thursday Night Opera House:
Opera singer Floria struggles to save her lover, the painter Cavaradossi, from sadistic police chief Scarpia in Giacomo Puccini’s thrilling 1900 tragedy, Tosca.
We will hear a much-admired 1981 recording by an all-star cast joined by the Philharmonia Orchestra and The Ambrosian Singers:
- Renata Scotto, soprano, as Floria Tosca
- Plácido Domingo, tenor, as Cavaradossi
- Renato Bruson, baritone, as Scarpia
- John Cheek, bass-baritone, as Angelotti
- Itzhak Perlman, bass, as Un carceriere
You read that correctly: Legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman sings (!) the role of the jailer.
The curtain rises on Tosca, with host Dr. Jay Pierson, at 7 pmET.
Wednesday, 11 February 2026
On this day in Classical Music History:
It’s the birthdate of French tenor Michel Sénéchal in Paris.
Sénéchal’s journey as a singer began in childhood as a chorister in his school and church choirs, followed by voice studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris. In 1950, he was awarded the 1er Prix de Chant in 1950 and taken on by the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, where he made his professional début.
Over Sénéchal’s career, he starred on the stages of the world’s most renowned opera companies, including those in Paris, Vienna, Salzburg, Berlin, Milan, London, Moscow, Madrid, San Francisco, and the Metropolitan in New York, and can be heard on over a hundred recordings. He was among Herbert von Karajan’s preferred singers and was well-known for his gorgeous voice and his humor.
Later in his career, Sénéchal was professor and director at the Opéra de Paris School and gave classes at Columbia University, Mannes College, the Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera, and the International Vocal Arts Institute in Montreal.
Tuesday, 10 February 2026
On this day in Classical Music History:
Barbara Kolb, the impressionist composer who was the first American woman to win the prestigious Rome Prize, was born on this day in Connecticut in 1938.
At the beginning of her education, Kolb studied the clarinet and added composition upon being selected as a student of Arnold Franchetti at the Hartt College of Music. She flourished, and a residency at the Berkshire Music Center was followed by a year in Vienna on a Fulbright scholarship.
In 1969, she won the Rome Prize, a major honor awarded by the American Academy in Rome to recognize excellence in the arts. Almost immediately, her innovative composition Soundings was premiered by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. It was later performed by Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic.
Always an innovator, Kolb wrote scores that require performers to record sections for playback during their live performance. Once such work is Millefoglie for chamber ensemble and tape recording. Other important Kolb works include Umbrian Colors for violin and guitar, All in Good Time for orchestra, and Looking for Claudio for solo guitar, mandolin, chimes, vibraphone, humming voices and additional guitars on recorded tape.
She died in October 2024, aged 86.
Monday, 9 February 2026
The Classical Station has all the music to fill your week, right here.
Tonight at 7pmET on Drop the Needle, we’ll hear a popular composition from a classic Deutsche Grammophon vinyl record — in fact, it’s No. 63 on our list of Top 100 listener favorites.
Host Vince Tillona will play the B side of album DG 2530 588 — the complete Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns, as performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Karl Böhm.
Enjoy the parade as tortoises and kangaroos, pianists, fossils, and an aquarium pass by. If we’re lucky, Vince may quote from the album’s witty liner notes by cheeky American poet Ogden Nash (“If called by a panther, / Don’t anther”).
Then at 8pmET on Monday Night at the Symphony:
The Mahler Chamber Orchestra is just different. While the typical major ensemble is at home in one concert hall and tours occasionally, the MCO is constantly on the go. Each year, its 45 professional musicians appear in more than 50 performances during visits to a dozen countries. Tonight, we’ll feature selections from the orchestra’s immense recorded repertoire, the core of which comprises Viennese classical and early Romantic works.
Your chance to hear them live will arrive in a few months! The orchestra is touring the United States this spring, with a performance of Prokofiev and Tsfasman scheduled for Memorial Hall in Chapel Hill on May 2.
On this day in Classical Music History:
Sir Sydney Nicholson, c. 1940. (Photo by Walter Stoneman – Used with permission from the National Portrait Gallery)
British organist, choir director, composer, and Founder and Director of the Royal School of Church Music Sir Sydney Nicholson was born in London in 1875.
Nicholson was a student of Charles Villiers Stanford and Walter Parratt at the Royal College of Music and began his long career as a church organist after he graduated. In 1919, he was named Westminster Abbey’s Organist and Master of the Choristers and he formed the Westminster Abbey Special Choir (which was in existence until 1982). He left the Abbey in 1928 to become warden of St. Nicholas College, Chislehurst, Kent, and to found and direct the Royal School of Church Music.
In 1938, Nicholson was knighted for his services to church music, which included editing what remains the standard hymn book in the Anglican church, Hymns Ancient and Modern; composing a motet for the Unknown Warrior called The Supreme Sacrifice; and writing the Communion Service in G, a popular work for parish choirs.
Following Nicholson’s death in 1947, his ashes were interred in the west cloister of Westminster Abbey.