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Latest Listeners’ Club Posts

Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata: Zino Francescatti and Robert Casadesus September 5, 2025

Beethoven composed ten sonatas for violin and piano. The giant of the set, in terms of technical demands and dramatic weight, is Sonata No. 9 in A Major, Op. 47, the “Kreutzer” Sonata. The work was dedicated to the French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer who called it “outrageously unintelligible” and never performed it. Beethoven and the Afro-E […]

Chausson’s Concert for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet: A Glorious Hybrid September 3, 2025

Completed in 1891, Ernest Chausson’s Concert for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet, Op. 21 is a glorious hybrid. With the violin and piano functioning as solo protagonists set against the larger ensemble of the quartet, its musical dialogue resembles the Baroque concerto grosso. Brimming with bold virtuosity, it takes us on a dramatic journ […]

Remembering Rodion Shchedrin September 1, 2025

Rodion Shchedrin, the celebrated Russian composer and pianist, passed away on August 29 in Munich, Germany. He was 92. Reflecting a colorful blend of influences from the archaic to the avant-garde to Russian folklore, Shchedrin’s works include the ballets Carmen Suite (1967) and Anna Karenina (1971), the opera Lolita (1993), three symphonie […]

Michael Torke’s “Last Fall”: New Music for Solo Violin and String Orchestra August 29, 2025

American composer Michael Torke (b. 1961) has just completed a new concerto for solo violin and string orchestra simply titled Last. Last is a collection of twelve meditative pieces that can be performed separately, or as a whole. The titles evoke memories and the passage of time. (Last Fall, Last Year, Last Month, Last Sunday, etc.) Torke […]

Wagner’s “Faust” Overture: A Tone Poem Inspired by Goethe August 27, 2025

As a teenager, Richard Wagner developed a fascination with Goethe’s Faust. Allegedly, at the age of 16, Wagner hid a copy of the play among his school books. For the rest of his life, allusions to Faust, and direct quotations, recurred throughout his writings. The Faustian archetype, in which the protagonist, in a deal with the devil, exch […]

John Cage’s “In a Landscape”: An Homage to Satie August 25, 2025

4’33” remains the most famous work of the American composer and theorist, John Cage (1912-1992). The experimental piece, composed in 1952 for any combination of instruments, requires performers to sit onstage and not play their instruments. The ambient sounds of the room take over and form the freest kind of chance music. Our ears become at […]

Stephan Koncz’ “A New Satiesfaction” (Gymnopédie No. 1): A Melancholic Musette After Satie August 22, 2025

With their sense of serene detachment, hypnotic repeating rhythms, and harmonic stasis, Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies opened the door to a dreamy new world, previously unimagined. Composed in 1888, the brief, atmospheric solo piano works anticipated ambient and experimental music of the late 20th century. The composer and theorist, John Ca […]