This Week at The Classical Station
by Chrissy Keuper
Saturday and Sunday, 1-2 March 2025
It’s the first weekend in March, All! We love being your soundtrack. Here’s what’s on the way:
Saturday:
Peggy Powell will be your host for Saturday On Point, which features music from the ballet Don Juan by Christoph Willibald Gluck and a lot of other lovely and dramatic works for dancers on the stage. Tune in at 1pm ET.
Then, join Haydn Jones from 6pm-12am ET for the Saturday Evening Request Program.
Peruse the playlist here and make requests for next week’s programs here.
Sunday:
Enjoy your sacred Sunday mornings with Great Sacred Music at 8am ET, and Tom Hayakawa will be with you at 6pm ET for Preview! and some of the latest releases from the classical music world. 
On these dates in the history of classical music:
Frédéric Chopin, c. 1849. (Photo by Louis-Auguste Bisson – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Polish composer and pianist extraordinaire Frédéric Chopin was born in Warsaw on March 1, 1810. It’s no surprise that Chopin was a child prodigy in music who had finished his formal education and his first compositions by the age of 20 when he moved to Paris. Throughout his career, Chopin preferred the small, intimate performances in the salons of friends and acquaintances to larger, public performances and performed only about 30 times before a large audience. He supported himself mainly by teaching piano lessons and selling his many, many compositions, and was friends with contemporaries like Franz Liszt and writer George Sand. All of Chopin’s compositions feature the piano; most are for solo piano and are influenced by Polish folk music. He was celebrated as a celebrity and a leader of the Romantic period of classical music during his lifetime and is still regarded as one of the most innovative musicians of all time.
Leif Segerstam with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, c. 2020. (Photo by Anna Flegontova – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Finnish-Swedish violinist, composer, and conductor Leif Segerstam was born March 2, 1944, in Vaasa. Segerstam had his first music lessons in viola and violin and performed with the Helsinki Youth Orchestra, then studied at the Sibelius Academy. He made his professional debuts as a violinist (1962) and a conductor (1963) and was immediately hired to conduct the Finnish National Opera and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Segerstam conducted the Helsinki Philharmonic; the Royal Swedish Opera; the Finnish National Opera; the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra; Deutsche Oper Berlin; the Metropolitan Opera; La Scala, Milan; London’s Royal Opera House; and many other orchestras in Europe, the Americas, and Australia. In addition, he was professor of conducting at his alma mater, the Sibelius Academy, and he composed more than 300 symphonies, as well as other works.
Friday, 28 February 2025
Happy Friday! It’s All-Request (Planetary Parade) Friday (10am-10pm ET) and then we’ll play your favorites and dedications again tomorrow on the Saturday Evening Request Program (6pm-12am ET). Check the playlists to see what’s planned and then make your requests and dedications for next week.
HEADS-UP: Ticket Giveaway
Next Wednesday (March 5th between 11am-12pm ET) on Classical Café, George Leef will give away a pair of tickets to see North Carolina Opera‘s production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Tune in and win some tickets to see this classic and hilarious opera!
On today’s date in classical music history:
Geraldine Farrar, c. 1908. (Photo by John H. Garo – Courtesy of Library of Congress)
It’s the birthdate of American soprano Geraldine Farrar in Melrose, Massachusetts, in 1882. Farrar was studying music in Boston at age five and performing publicly in her teenage years, with formal studies in voice in New York City, Paris, and then Berlin with baritone Francesco Graziani and soprano Lilli Lehmann. Farrar made her operatic debut in Berlin at the age of 19, singing the role of Marguerite in Charles Gounod’s Faust with the Berlin Hofoper. She went on to the Opéra de Monte-Carlo for a few years before her American debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1906; she performed with the Met until she retired in 1922. As a performer, Farrar was quite a sensation and developed a well-known following (especially among young American women) who called themselves “Gerry-flappers.” She premiered title roles including Pietro Mascagni’s Amica (Monte Carlo, 1905), Giacomo Puccini’s Suor Angelica (New York, 1918), and Umberto Giordano’s Madame Sans-Gêne (New York, 1915); she trained her own flock of geese for her role as the Goosegirl in Engelbert Humperdinck’s Königskinder with the Met in 1910.
Geraldine Farrar as the Goose Girl in Königskinder at the Metropolitan Opera, c. 1910. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Farrar was also featured in many recordings and advertisements of the Victor Talking Machine Company and she was a star of the silent films being made at the time by Paramount Studios; she made more than a dozen films from 1915 to 1920 and six of them were directed by Cecil B. DeMille, including a 1915 adaptation of Georges Bizet’s Carmen. According to Farrar, her finest role on screen was as Joan of Arc in Joan the Woman (1917). After retiring from opera in 1922, she gave concerts and recitals and appeared in nationwide radio broadcasts for the National Broadcasting Company. Farrar also has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: one for music, and one for film.
Thursday, 27 February 2025
Happy Friday Eve, All!
We hope you’re having a wonderful week and we thank you for spending it with The Classical Station.
This evening’s Thursday Night Opera House is the 1959 recording of Emerson Buckley conducting the New York City Opera Company and Orchestra with legendary soloists (including soprano Beverly Sills in her first starring role) in The Ballad of Baby Doe by Douglas Moore and John Latouche. The opera is based on the true story of Horace Tabor (Walter Cassel), a wealthy mine owner and the Mayor of Leadville, Colorado, and his love affair with Elizabeth “Baby” Doe (Beverly Sills), the wife of a local miner.
Join Dr. Jay Pierson at 7pm ET for one of American music’s most treasured operas.
Tomorrow is All-Request (Planetary Parade) Friday, so check out the playlist to see what cosmically-flavored works your fellow listeners have asked to hear. Make your requests and special dedications for next week right here.
On this day in classical music history:
It’s the birthdate of American contralto Marian Anderson in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1897. Anderson’s musical life began in the Union Baptist Church; her aunt Mary convinced her to join the junior church choir at age six (and to perform publicly, elsewhere) and Anderson later said her aunt’s influence was the beginning of her singing career. By age 10, Anderson was singing (often as a soloist) with the People’s Chorus of Philadelphia; the chorus and her church raised money for Anderson to have formal singing lessons and to attend South Philadelphia High School. She graduated from the school in 1921; made her first recordings for the Victor company in 1923; and found her first public success in 1925 when she won a singing competition sponsored by the New York Philharmonic and performed with the orchestra. Anderson continued voice lessons, found a manager, and had her first performance at Carnegie Hall (1928), but racial prejudice and tension kept her from launching a career representative of her talent, at least in the U.S. She was able to find more success and collaboration in Europe; Anderson made her European debut in London in 1933 and toured Europe and Russia, quickly becoming a favorite performer of many orchestras, conductors, and composers. She toured Europe and the U.S. throughout the 1930s, but she was turned away from many American hotels and restaurants; she was a frequent houseguest of Albert Einstein, who became a close friend. The racial inequality that Anderson faced as a performer most famously came to a head in 1939, when she was denied permission to sing a concert in Washington, D.C.’s Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall, which had a white-performers-only policy. As a result, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the D.A.R.; she also became one of the people who organized Anderson’s performance in a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which was seen by more than 75,000 people in person and was heard by millions on the radio. During World War II, the D.A.R. asked Anderson to perform in an integrated concert benefit for the Red Cross at Constitution Hall; she also entertained troops in hospitals and on base throughout WWII and the Korean War. She became the first African American to sing with the Metropolitan Opera (1955); she sang for President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration (1957) and President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration (1961); and she toured and performed all over the world. President Eisenhower appointed her a delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Committee and she was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1963, she sang at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and received the first Presidential Medal of Freedom (one of many, many awards and accolades received in her lifetime), and she retired from singing in 1965.
Wednesday, 26 February 2025
A very good day to you all!
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On this date in the history of classical music:
Lithograph of Anton Reicha by Charles Constans after Salomon Counis, c. 1825. (Courtesy of Gallica – Bibliothèque nationale de France)
It’s the birthdate of Czech-French flutist and composer Anton Reicha in 1770 in Prague (he was also known as Antonin and Antoine). Reicha ran away from home at the age of ten and wound up with his uncle Josef Reicha in Bavaria; Josef and his wife adopted him and gave him his first music lessons in violin, flute, and piano. The Reichas moved to Bonn in 1785 and he joined the court orchestra (Hofkapelle) of Archduke Maximillian Francis of Austria as a violinist and a flutist. A few years later, a young Ludwig van Beethoven also joined the Hofkapelle and the two became friends. Reicha wrote and conducted his first symphony in 1787; studied at the University of Bonn from 1789 to 1794, when Napoleon’s troops attacked and captured the city; and escaped to Hamburg and supported himself by teaching harmony, composition, and piano lessons, while also composing and studying mathematics and philosophy. He moved to Paris (1799) and then to Vienna (1801), where he studied with Antonio Salieri and Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and renewed his friendships with both Beethoven and Joseph Haydn (Reicha’s 36 Fugues for piano (1803) were dedicated to Haydn). Napoleonic troops occupied Vienna in 1805 and Reicha returned to Paris, where he became a renowned music theorist and composition teacher and was eventually appointed professor of counterpoint and fugue at the Conservatoire de Paris (Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, and Charles Gounod were among his students). It was in Paris that Reicha composed his most famous works, his 25 wind quintets, which premiered in Paris and became popular all over Europe.
Tuesday, 25 February 2024
Hello, Listeners!
Get those requests and dedications in early this week because All-Request Friday will be here before you know it. This week, there’s a planetary parade and we’ll be playing cosmically-flavored favorites. Do you have something on your list that fits?
Did you know that some of the greatest composers in history used musical cryptography to hide names, philosophies, and even theological texts in their works? Read more about the secrets hidden in plain sight within classical masterpieces in our latest Classical Considerations: Symbols, Codes, and Hidden Messages.
On this date in the history of classical music:
Dame Myra Hess, c. 1940. (Photo by Howard Coster – Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery NPG x10674)
It’s the birthdate of British pianist Myra Hess in South Hampstead, London in 1890. Hess started piano lessons at age five and studied at the Guildhall School of Music and the Royal Academy of Music (she won a scholarship to the Academy at age 12, in 1903). Her public debut was in 1907 with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which kicked off her first concert tour throughout Britain, France, and the Netherlands. Hess was largely unable to perform or tour through the years of World War I, but she picked right up again in 1922 and made her U.S. debut. During World War II, Hess helped organize thousands of concerts at the National Gallery in London during midday because theaters and performance halls were blacked out after dark. The lunchtime concerts took place without fail for more than six years, Monday through Friday, and Hess personally performed in 150 of them. King George VI named Hess a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1941 for her role in “maintaining the morale of the populace of London.” As a musician, she was best known for her performances of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms, but Hess had a varied repertoire that included contemporary works, as well; she also promoted the piano music of Schubert and arranged several of J.S. Bach’s cantatas for solo piano or two pianos. Her final public performance was in 1961 at London’s Royal Festival Hall.
Monday, 24 February 2025
A good day to you, Listeners! Come spend your week with us.
This week’s Monday Night at the Symphony features recordings of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (founded 1895) with music by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, James MacMillan, Camille Saint-Saëns, and more, conducted by Lorin Maazel and current Music Director, Manfred Honeck.
Meet us at the symphony at 8pm ET.
Tomorrow (Tuesday) on Classical Café, George Leef presents his weekly Legendary Performer feature; this week, it’s violinist extraordinaire Nicolò Paganini.
And on Wednesday (February 26th between 11am-12pm ET), George will give away a pair of tickets to see the North Carolina Symphony perform The Ring Without Words, a selection of orchestral works from the four operas that make up Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung): Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).
On this date in classical music history:
Jiří Bělohlávek conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2011. (Photo by Clive Barda, BBC)
It’s the birthdate of Czech conductor Jiří Bělohlávek in 1946 in Prague. Bělohlávek studied cello in his young life and graduated from the Prague Conservatory and the city’s Academy of Performing Arts, but after school he turned his attention to conducting and won the Czech Young Conductors’ Competition in 1970. He conducted the Brno Philharmonic from 1972-1978, then the Prague Symphony Orchestra until 1989; he was chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra from 1990-1992 and again from 2012-2017; he founded the Prague Philharmonia in 1993 and served as music director and chief conductor until 2005; and was chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 2006-2012 and then guest conductor until his death in 2017. Bělohlávek was also a teacher and was named Professor of Conducting at the Prague Academy of Music in 1997. He was celebrated as a champion and leading interpreter of Czech music, especially the works of Antonín Dvořák and Bohuslav Martinů.