The Listeners' Club
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Welcome to The Listeners' Club, a blog dedicated to the visceral experience of listening to music. You could easily define this as a "classical music appreciation blog," but that description may be too limiting. We listen to a wide variety of music, occasionally including jazz, rock, and contemporary, without regard for labels.
The Listeners' Club
1d ago
Composed during the summer of 1816, the Sonata No. 28 in A Major, Op. 101 is the first of Beethoven’s five “late period” piano sonatas. It is music filled with mystery and divine revelation. Isolated from the world as a result of nearly total hearing loss, Beethoven, in his final years, conceived of music unlike anything which came before. Gone is the classical charm, and ferocious revolutionary struggle of the earlier periods. ...
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The Listeners' Club
2d ago
Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (Le quattro stagioni) is one of the earliest and most iconic examples of programmatic music. Vivaldi composed the collection of four violin concerti, each depicting a season of the year, during his tenure as music director at the court chapel of Mantua. Together with eight additional concerti, the works were published in Amsterdam in 1725 under the enticing title, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (“The Contest Between Harmony and ...
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The Listeners' Club
5d ago
Patrons of Broadway were met with a surprise when, on the evening of January 11, 1976, they packed the Winter Garden Theatre for the opening of Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures. Sondheim later called the show “the most bizarre and unusual musical ever to be seen in a commercial setting.” (Finishing the Hat) Directed and produced by Hal Prince, with a book by John Weidman, Pacific Overtures chronicles the 1853 American “gunboat diplomacy” of ...
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The Listeners' Club
1w ago
J.S. Bach’s six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin are technical and musical marvels. They transform the violin, an instrument usually associated with a single melodic line, into a vehicle of dazzling polyphony. The collection begins with the purity and resonance of G minor, a key which is centered on the open fifths of the violin’s lowest two strings. The Adagio which opens the Violin Sonata No. 1 in G minor, BWV ...
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The Listeners' Club
1w ago
The Sinfonia in B-flat Major, HWV 339 is music of the young George Frideric Handel. It was probably composed in Hamburg between 1704 and 1706, in the years before Handel’s move to London. No autograph manuscript exists, and it remained unpublished until 1979. The Sinfonia unfolds in three movements (fast-slow-fast). As a composer, Handel was skillful at borrowing and adapting existing music. The Sinfonia’s opening movement (Allegro) was taken from the composer’s ...
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The Listeners' Club
2w ago
In Slavic mythology, Polednice, the Noon Witch, is a demonic figure who is known to emerge in the middle of the hottest summer days, causing farmers working in the fields to suffer heatstroke or insanity. The poem, Polednice, by the Czech folklorist, Karel Jaromír Erben (1811-1870), tells the story of a mother who, while preparing lunch, is desperate to quiet a young child who screams for attention. She warns her son that ...
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The Listeners' Club
2w ago
The Protestant Reformation changed the world forever. Anticipating ideals of the Enlightenment, which swept across Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was a revolutionary movement which challenged the authority of the Catholic hierarchy, elevated the sanctity of the individual, and affirmed his direct relationship with God. The 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn chose to celebrate these exalted ideals, not with a choral work, but with a dramatic symphony. Completed in 1830, the ...
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The Listeners' Club
2w ago
For years, “Calcium Night” was a boisterous tradition at Yale University, where Charles Ives was a student between 1894 and 1898. Students wishing to join a fraternity paraded around the campus, singing their fraternity’s song under the glow of a calcium light, the “limelight” used on theater stages before electricity. (The calcium light was so blinding that it was used during the American Civil War to illuminate artillery targets, and on navel ...
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The Listeners' Club
3w ago
Rooted in diatonic and modal harmony, much of the music of American composer David Diamond (1915-2005) unfolds as a dynamic weave of contrapuntal voices. It flows in a seemingly continuous stream, in which one phrase opens into the next without resolution. Listening to this music, we are forced to celebrate the magic of each fleeting moment. Diamond composed his String Quartet No. 3 in 1946, shortly after the end of the Second ...
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The Listeners' Club
3w ago
Last weekend at the Richmond Symphony we welcomed American pianist Clayton Stephenson. The 25 year old New York native performed Ravel’s glittering and bluesy Piano Concerto in G Major. Two other 20th century masterworks rounded out the program; one depicting the majesty and mystery of the sea (Debussy’s La Mer), and the other rooted firmly in the earth (Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring). A finalist at the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano ...
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