This Week at The Classical Station
by Chrissy Keuper
Monday, 23 June 2025
Welcome to the new week, All! Come enjoy some great classical music with us.
This evening at 7pm ET, join Vince Tillona for Drop the Needle and the warmth of vinyl recordings. This week’s show features Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture from a 1958 Mercury release.
And at 8pm ET, Monday Night at the Symphony features the Rhenish Philharmonic Orchestra and works by Karl Goldmark and Louis Glass, with Alfred Walter conducting Carl Reinecke’s Symphony in A (in honor of the composer’s 201st birthday today).
See you at the symphony!
Tuesday on Classical Café, join George Leef for this week’s Legendary Performer, conductor Manuel Rosenthal.
On this date in classical music history:
Carl Reinecke, c. 1890. (Photographer unknown – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
It’s the birthdate of German pianist and composer Carl Reinecke in 1824 in what is now Hamburg (it was part of Denmark at the time of Reinecke’s birth). His father was a music teacher who gave the young Reinecke his first music lessons, starting with the violin and then the piano. Reinecke began composing when he was seven years old and had his public debut as a pianist when he was twelve. His first concert tour (in Denmark and Sweden) began at age 19 and then he settled in Leipzig, where he was a student of Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, AND Franz Liszt, and gave more concert tours. In 1846, Reinecke was appointed Court Pianist for Christian VIII in Copenhagen, but he only stayed for a couple of years before moving to Paris; Cologne (where he was a professor at the Cologne Conservatory); Barmen; and Breslau (as director and conductor of the Singakademie). Reinecke returned to Leipzig in 1860 as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and professor of composition and piano at the Leipzig Conservatory; he led the orchestra until 1895. Throughout his life, Reinecke wrote music and nearly 300 of his compositions were published during his lifetime.