This Week at The Classical Station

This Week at The Classical Station

by Chrissy Keuper

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Saturday and Sunday, 18-19 January 2025

It’s the weekend, Listeners! Welcome. We are here for all of your listening needs.

Here’s what’s coming up this weekend:

 

Saturday:

Saturday On Point (1pm ET) features The Creatures of Prometheus by Ludwig van Beethoven.

 

 

Then, join us at 6pm ET for the Saturday Evening Request Program.
Peruse the playlist here and make requests for next week’s programs here.

 

Sunday:

This week’s Great Sacred Music includes performances by the Oxford Camerata; the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus; and Anonymous 4, with works by Sergei Rachmaninoff; Hildegard von Bingen; Ludwig van Beethoven, and more. Our featured work is Presbyterian Communion Service in F by Florence Price. We invite you to join us for Great Sacred Music at 8am ET, right after Sing for Joy.

And at 6pm ET, Preview! (hosted by Tom Hayakawa) spotlights new releases in the classical music world.

 

On these dates in the history of classical music:

Russian composer (and military general) César Cui was born January 18, 1835, in Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania). His father was a French soldier with Napoleon’s army who was injured in battle, stayed in Russia, and married a noblewoman. (The original spelling of his surname was Queuille.) Cui took piano lessons as a child and began composing as a teenager, just before he was sent to study at the Saint Petersburg Military Engineering-Technical University until 1955; he began his military career in 1857 as an instructor in the architecture of military fortifications (Czar Nicholas II was one of his students over the years) at three academies in Saint Petersburg. Cui became an expert in military fortifications, serving on the front during the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878); becoming a professor (1880); attaining the rank of general (1906); and writing textbooks on the subject that became standards in military education. Cui’s musical life flourished along with his professional military life. He met Mily Balakirev in 1856 who (along with Franz Liszt) was a major influence on Cui’s growth as a composer and his success in musical circles. The first public performance of Cui’s work was in 1859 (Scherzo, Op. 1) then 1869 (his opera William Ratcliff). His body of work also included art songs and children’s songs; works for piano and chamber ensembles; and orchestral music and he was a member of The Five (Cui, group leader Mily Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin), a group of composers who sought to embody distinctly Russian forms of music.

English conductor Sir Simon Rattle was born January 19, 1955, in Liverpool, and was an early student of violin, piano, and percussion. Rattle attended the Royal Academy of Music (1971-1974); he won the John Player International Conducting Competition and was named assistant conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra the year he graduated. Rattle went on to conduct the Glyndebourne Festival Opera; the London Sinfonietta; the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic; the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE); the Vienna Philharmonic; a number of North American orchestras (including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra); the Berlin Philharmonic; the London Symphony Orchestra; the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; and the Czech Philharmonic, where he is contracted through the 2025 season. The Royal Philharmonic Society presented its Gold Medal to Rattle in 2000.

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Friday, 17 January 2025

Happy All-Request Friday, Listeners!

And we’ll play your favorites and dedications again tomorrow on the Saturday Evening Request Program (6pm-12am ET). Check the playlists to see what will play when, and make your requests and dedications for next week.

HEADS-UP: Ticket Giveaway

 

Tune into Classical Café with George Leef on Wednesday (January 22nd, between 11am-12pm ET) for a chance to win a pair of tickets to the North Carolina Symphony’s performance of Scheherazade by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, as well as works by Caroline Shaw and Henri Dutilleux. 

 

 

On today’s date in the history of classical music:

It’s the birthdate of New Zealand-British organist Dame Gillian Weir in Martinborough in 1941. Weir was 19 when she was co-winner of the Auckland Star Piano Competition, and then won a scholarship of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) in London a year later. She studied in London under pianist Cyril Smith and organist Ralph Downes. In 1964, Weir won the St. Albans International Organ Competition, then made her debut at the Royal Albert Hall on the opening night of the 1965 Promenade Concerts as the youngest organist to perform there. Weir was a champion of works by Olivier Messiaen, who was little-known when she began performing his compositions; she gave a series of recitals of Messiaen’s organ works in Westminster Cathedral in 1998 and became the first organist honored with the Evening Standard Award for Outstanding Solo Performance as a result. Weir was the first woman elected to the Council of the Royal College of Organists (1977); the first woman President of the Incorporated Association of Organists (1981); the first musician to receive the Turnovsky Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts (1985); the first woman president of the Royal College of Organists, England (1994); was Promoted Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to music (1996); and was awarded the Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon Award in 2011. 

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Thursday, 16 January 2025

Happy Friday Eve, Listeners!

Tomorrow is All-Request Friday, so check out the playlist to see when your (and your fellow listeners’) favorites and dedications are scheduled to broadcast. We are looking forward to it, as always!

Put in your requests/dedications for next week here.

 

This evening’s Thursday Night Opera House features the 1980 recording of Michel Plasson conducting L’Orchestre et Choeurs du Capitole de Toulouse plus amazing soloists in Charles Gounod’s Mireille, based on the 1861 poem Mirèio by Frédéric Mistral. Young Mireille (Mirella Freni) falls in love with Vincent (Alain Vanzo), a basket-weaver from a lower class. Her family and others disapprove. Meanwhile, the bull-tamer Ourrias (José van Dam) attempts to woo her, but Mireille follows her heart (to a tragic end). Join us at 7pm ET for this 2006 archival broadcast with late TNOH host Al Ruocchio.

 

On this day in classical music history:

It’s the birthdate of Spanish soprano Pilar Lorengar (born Lorenza Pilar Garcia Seta) in 1928 in Zaragoza. As a child, Lorengar was on Radio Zaragoza’s program Ondas Infantiles (Children’s Waves). She began formal music lessons as a teenager, then moved to Barcelona to study at the Barcelona Music Conservatory; she paid for her studies by performing under the name Loren Arce. Lorengar continued her studies in Madrid and then West Berlin, and became a chorus member at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in 1949; her professional debut was in 1950 in Oran, Algeria, and she was a performing soloist in Barcelona by 1952. Lorengar’s career as an opera star began in 1955 at the Festival international d’Art Lyrique in Aix-en-Provence, with performances following in London, Glyndebourne, and Buenos Aires. She contracted with the Deutsche Oper Berlin and sang with the company for the next 30 years. Lorengar also performed at the Salzburg Festival; at the San Francisco Opera; and the Metropolitan Opera, and sang recitals and concerts in Brussels; La Scala at Milan; with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna State Opera; in Paris; and in Tokyo. She was known for her talent and crystalline voice in opera and in Spanish Zarzuela. Her final concert was in Spain in 1991 and she received the Order of Merit of Berlin in 1994. The IES Pilar Lorengar in Zaragoza, a free public vocational high school for media arts, is named for her. 

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Wednesday, 15 January 2025

Hello, Listeners! Thank you for spending your week with The Classical Station.

 

On this date in the history of classical music:

It’s the birthdate of Austrian composer Johanna Müller-Herrmann in 1878 in Vienna. She had music lessons as part of her childhood, but was not allowed to focus on music as a career. Instead, she was trained as a teacher and taught at a public school in Vienna. She married in 1893 and was able to turn her attention once again to music, taking piano and violin lessons and studying music theory (Alexander von Zemlinsky and Franz Schmidt were among her teachers). Her composition Seven Songs was published in 1895 and from then on, Müller-Herrmann’s works were performed at the Vienna Musikverein and other venues. She was named professor of music theory at the New Vienna Conservatory in 1918 and she taught and continued to compose until her death in 1941. Müller-Herrmann had an extensive collection of works: songs and choral music (including Lied der Erinnerung: In Memoriam (1930), a cantata set to text by Walt Whitman); chamber music; larger works for solo instruments; and orchestral works. Müller-Herrmann was considered one of the foremost composers of the era, but she was overlooked as many women were and most of her compositions were never recorded until the 1990s, including her Heroic Overture, Op. 21, and her String Quartet in E flat major, Op. 6.

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Tuesday, 14 January 2025

A very good day to you all!

Get your requests and dedications in for this week’s All-Request Friday and the Saturday Evening Request Program. We are always looking forward to hearing your favorite music and extending your dedications to those you care about.

 

Support classical music AND public radio at the same time when you donate to The Classical Station. Are you a business owner? Become one of our Business Sponsors and reach an audience of hundreds of thousands of listeners in North Carolina and around the world.

 

On this date in the history of classical music:

It’s the birthdate of Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons, who was born in Riga in 1943. Jansons’ mother Iraida was a lead singer with the Riga Opera and his father Arvīds was the conductor of the opera orchestra and a violinist. The family was Jewish and Jansons was born in hiding. He took his first music lessons with his father, who was called to Leningrad to be assistant conductor to the Leningrad Philharmonic in 1956; Jansons joined his father and studied conducting at the Leningrad Conservatory. He was discovered (1968) and nurtured by Herbert von Karajan, who he studied with in Salzburg. The Soviet authorities blocked Karajan’s offer for Jansons to be assistant conductor to the Berlin Philharmonic in the early 1970s. Nothing stopped his career, however, and he went on to collaborate with and lead an impressive number of the world’s major orchestras, starting in 1973 as Associate Conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, then Music Director of the Oslo Philharmonic (1979-2000). Jansons was Principal Guest Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra)from 1992); Music Director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (1997-2004); Chief Conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam (2004-2015); Chief Conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (2003 until his death in 2019); and he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert three times (2006, 2012, and 2016). Jansons was considered one of classical music’s leading conductors and his interpretations and recordings of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Russian composers Pyotr Iliych Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Dmitri Shostakovich remain legendary.

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Monday, 13 January 2025

A very good new week to all of you. Thank you so much for listening to The Classical Station.

This week’s Monday Night at the Symphony features recordings from the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and music by Richard Strauss, Cesar Cui, Federico Busoni, and others, conducted by Kenneth Schermerhorn, Samuel Wong, and Antonio de Almeida. Join us at the symphony at 8pm ET.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, January 14), tune into Classical Café with George Leef for his weekly Legendary Performer feature; this week, it’s pianist Wanda Landowska.

Then on Wednesday (January 15, between 11am-12pm ET), George will give away a pair of tickets to Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle’s production of Letters from Wolfgang. Actor Ron Menzel and bassoonist Chris Ullfers interpret some of the correspondence from the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Tune in and win!

 

On this date in classical music history:

It’s the birthdate of Soviet-Russian cellist Daniil Shafran in 1923 in Petrograd (then Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg). Shafran’s parents were musicians; his father Boris was principal cellist of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra and was the young Shafran’s first teacher. Shafran ended up as a young student at the Leningrad Conservatory and made his orchestral debut at age 11 with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under British conductor, Albert Coates. At 14, he won first prize in the 1937 USSR All-Union Competition for Violinists and Cellists, which meant national fame and a cello made by Antonio Amati (1630). World War II meant a hiatus for music in Leningrad and by 1945, Shafran was joined by a young Mstislav Rostropovich in the status of top cellists in the country. Shafran graduated from the Conservatory in 1950 and launched a performance and recording career as a soloist, but he rarely performed or recorded outside the Soviet Union/Eastern bloc and so wasn’t well-known internationally until the 1960s when he made his U.S. and British debuts. He toured internationally more frequently until the mid 1990s. Cellist Steven Isserlis named Shafran as a genius and his hero, saying of Shafran’s recording of Franz Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata, I was immediately ‘hooked’ – what a sound! What elegance! What charm – and what mastery!”