This Week at The Classical Station

by Chrissy Keuper

Saturday and Sunday, 1-2 February 2025

Here’s what’s coming up this weekend:

Saturday:

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 Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge; the Holland Boys’ Choir and the Netherlands Bach Collegium; and the London Symphony Orchestra, with works by Henry Purcell, Edward Elgar, and more. Our featured work is Spirituals Suite by Adolphus Hailstork. Join us at 8am ET, right after Sing for Joy.

And tune in at 6pm ET for Preview! with Tom Hayakawa and some of the latest releases in the classical music world.

On these dates in the history of classical music:

Renata Tebaldi in Milan, c. 1956. (Photo by Touring Club Italiano – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi was born February 1, 1922, in Pesaro. Tebaldi contracted polio as a very young child and was unable to take part in strenuous activity, so music was a natural fit; she first sang with a church choir and then began piano and voice lessons as a teenager. She was admitted to the Parma Conservatory and then the Liceo musicale Rossini in Pesaro. Tebaldi made her first appearances on stage in Italy during World War II; her 1946 audition for Arturo Toscanini marked the beginning of her international fame and she made her debut at La Scala later that year. Tebaldi went on to sing at the San Francisco Opera (1950) and the Metropolitan Opera (from 1955 into the 1970s). She was renowned for the beauty and clarity of her voice (Toscanini called her la voce d’angelo (the voice of the angel) and for her vocal dexterity when performing and recording. Tebaldi retired in 1973 after more than 1260 performances in more than a thousand operas and in concerts, and she won the first Grammy Award for Best Classical Performance – Vocal Soloist in 1959.

Jascha Heifetz, c. 1915. (Photo by Bain News Service – Courtesy of Library of Congress)

Russian-American violinist Jascha Heifetz was born February 2, 1901, in Vilnius (then part of the Russian Empire, now the capital of Lithuania). Heifetz’s father was a violinist who bought his young son a violin before the age of two. By age five, Heifetz was deemed a child prodigy and entered the Saint Petersburg Conservatory when he was nine. By 1914, he was performing with the Berlin Philharmonic and had toured most of Europe. His family left Russia in 1917 and emigrated to the U.S.; Heifetz made his U.S. debut that year at Carnegie Hall and was also made an honorary member of the Alpha chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, a national fraternity for men in music. Heifetz became a U.S. citizen in 1925. He performed and recorded continually until the mid 1950s (his first recordings were in Russia in 1910-1911), when he chose to have more time off. Heifetz finally stopped performing and recording altogether after surgery on his right shoulder in 1972, but he continued to teach violin, holding master classes at UCLA and the University of Southern California and teaching private lessons in his home in the 1980s. He is considered perhaps the greatest violinist since Paganini and the standard-bearer for violinists of the 20th century.

Friday, 31 January 2025

It’s Friday!

All-Request Friday (10am-10pm ET) that is, and then we’ll play your favorites and dedications again tomorrow on the Saturday Evening Request Program (6pm-12am ET).

See the playlists, and then make your requests and dedications for next week.

Heads-Up: Ticket Giveaway

Wednesday (February 5th between 11am-12pm ET) on Classical Café, George Leef will give away a pair of tickets to Carolina Ballet‘s interpretation of Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, choreographed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, in a program that also includes a world premiere ballet by Amy Hall Garner. Tune in and win!

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

Franz Schubert in a portrait by Wilhelm August Rieder (1875), after an 1825 watercolor. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

It’s the birthdate of Austrian composer Franz Schubert, born in Vienna in 1797. Schubert received his first music lessons from his father (violin) and his brother (piano); Schubert then studied composition with Antonio Salieri while also training to be a schoolteacher. In 1821, he was named a performing member of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and gave a concert of his own compositions in 1828. That concert was the only chance for Schubert to hear his own music performed in his short lifetime; he died eight months later at age 31 from typhoid fever (and/or possibly syphilis). Since then, however, Schubert has been declared one of the most prolific and greatest composers in the history of classical music. He wrote more than 600 secular vocal works, especially Lieder; seven complete symphonies; lots of vocal sacred music; operas, incidental music, and a lot of compositions for piano (including a large set for piano for four hands) and for chamber ensembles.

Thursday, 30 January 2025

Happy Friday Eve, Listeners!

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

This evening’s Thursday Night Opera House features the 1990 recording of Daniel Barenboim conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chorus of the German State Opera Berlin, and incredible soloists in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal. Would-be hero Parsifal (Siegfried Jerusalem) sets out on a quest to save some knights, find the Holy Grail, and heal a king. Join Dr. Jay Pierson at 7pm ET for the adventure.

On this day in classical music history:

Walter Damrosch, c. 1908. (Bain News Service – Courtesy of Library of Congress)

It’s the birthdate of German-American conductor and composer Walter Damrosch, born in Breslau in 1862. Damrosch’s father was Leopold Damrosch (a violin virtuoso who eventually conducted the Metropolitan Opera) and his mother was Helene von Heimburg (an opera singer). He began his formal musical training at the Dresden Conservatory until 1871, when the family moved to the U.S. Damrosch made his conducting debut at 19, during the New York Symphony Society’s (later the New York Symphony Orchestra) first festival in 1881. In 1884, he was named assistant director at the Metropolitan Opera and was soon also named conductor of the New York Oratorio and Symphony Societies (a post he held from 1885 to 1928). Damrosch was famous as a conductor of Richard Wagner’s operas, and he oversaw the first successful performance of Parsifal (tonight’s opera on Thursday Night Opera House!) in the U.S. in 1886; in 1894, he founded the Damrosch Opera Company specifically to perform Wagner’s operas. He was also an early pioneer in the radio broadcasting classical music; he was the music director for the National Broadcasting Company in its early days (1920s) and from 1928 to 1942, Damrosch hosted NBC’s Music Appreciation Hour, a radio lecture series about classical music for young listeners. Throughout his conducting career, Damrosch was a composer, mainly of operas (The Scarlet Letter (1896); Cyrano (1913); The Man Without a Country (1937)) and other incidental music for the stage. In addition, Damrosch is credited with convincing business tycoon Andrew Carnegie to help fund a new music hall in New York City (Carnegie Hall).

Wednesday, 29 January 2025

Hello, Listeners! We thank you SO MUCH for your support and for spending your time with us.

On this date in the history of classical music:

Marguerite Canal accepting her first Premier Grand Prix de Rome, c. 1920. (From Comoedia illustré – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

It’s the birthdate of French conductor and composer Marguerite Canal in Toulouse in 1890. Canal’s parents introduced her to music and poetry and when she was 21, she entered studies in voice and piano at the Conservatoire de Paris. Canal became the first woman in France to conduct an orchestra in 1917 and was named to the Conservatoire’s singing faculty after she graduated; in 1920 she was the second woman to receive the Premier Grand Prix de Rome in musical composition with her drama Don Juan. Canal moved to Rome, Italy, after her win and composed most of her music while she was living there. She returned to France in 1932 to continue teaching (until her retirement in the 1970s). Most of her compositions were for voice like Don Juan, such as Requiem (1921), and a song cycle, Amours triestes, but she also wrote a Sonata for Violin and Piano (1922).

Tuesday, 28 January 2024

A very good day to you all!

We are already looking forward to All-Request Friday and the Saturday Evening Request Program, so let us know what your favorites are and who you want them dedicated to, right here.

On this date in the history of classical music:

Sir John Tavener. (Photo by Devlin Crow – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Today is the birthdate of British composer John Tavener in Wembley, London, in 1944. By the time he was 12, Tavener wanted to be a composer. He studied music and piano and began composing in earnest at Highgate School (John Rutter was a fellow student) and he sang in the school’s choir, often in recordings for BBC productions. He was still a teenager in 1961 when he was named organist and choirmaster at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Kensington (until 1975); he entered the Royal Academy of Music in 1962, giving up the piano and choosing to devote everything to composing and making recordings. Tavener is probably best-known for his choral compositions and his first successes were a cantata called The Whale (1968) and A Celtic Requiem (1969); one of his most popular works is The Lamb (1982), based on William Blake’s poem of the same name. But Tavener also wrote instrumental music like The Protecting Veil, a work for cello, and an opera called Thérèse (1972-1976). He took on a teaching post at Trinity College of Music, London, in 1971, and converted to the Orthodox Church in 1977; the church’s liturgical music became a major influence on Tavener’s own compositions and he completed an original setting of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

Monday, 27 January 2025

Hello, All! Thank you for listening and for sharing the Great Classical Music with us. We love it, too!

This week’s Monday Night at the Symphony celebrates the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bruno Walter and features a 1956 performance of Leonard Bernstein as piano soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G.

Join us for the symphony at 8pm ET.

Fritz Kreisler (left), Harold Bauer (top), Pablo Casals (right), and Walter Johannes Damrosch at Carnegie Hall, c. 1917. (Photo by Bain News Service – Courtesy of Library of Congress)

Tomorrow (Tuesday) on Classical Café, George Leef presents his weekly Legendary Performer feature; this week, it’s American violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler.

And on Wednesday (January 29th between 11am-12pm ET) he’ll give away a pair of tickets to Burning Coal Theatre Company’s performance of Paint Me This House of Love by Chelsea Woolley.

On this date in classical music history:

Édouard Lalo, c. 1865. (Photo by Pierre Petit – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

It’s the birthdate of French violinist, violist, and composer Édouard Lalo in 1823 in Lille. Lalo’s formal education in music began at the Conservatoire de Paris when he was a teenager, as a student in violin (and he took private composition lessons); his father had been against music studies, but Lalo moved to Paris anyway and put himself through school as a string player and music teacher while also composing. He also helped found the Armingaud Quartet in 1848. Lalo wrote a wide variety of music, including opera (Le Roi d’Ys) and other stage works, but he focused mostly on chamber music and orchestral compositions and was well-known for both (Symphonie Espagnole; Symphony in G minor). His death in 1892 left a number of works unfinished, including an opera called La Jacquerie, which was completed by composer and music critic Arthur Coquard.