Classical Post

When British saxophonist Jess Gillam refers to her Carnegie Hall debut as "a real dream come true," she's being literal. Since the age of 12, she's dreamt of taking to New York City's fabled stage and sharing her passion for the saxophone with the audience.

Gillam's dream became reality in October, when she and pianist Thomas Weaver performed a wide-ranging program of music — from Telemann and John Dowland to Meredith Monk and Barbara Thompson — at Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall. For Gillam, it was important that her program not only reflected the capabilities of her instrument, but also allowed her to forge meaningful connections with the audience.

"It's important for me to play music that I really resonate with, music that really speaks to me so that I can tell the story well and share that story with the audience," Gillam says on the latest episode of the Classical Post podcast. "That was my main aim last night — to create an atmosphere and a place for the audience to exist."

That insatiable drive to share her excitement about classical music has led to a bevy of remarkable opportunities and honors. At just 24 years old, Gillam remains the youngest presenter to host a BBC Radio 3 program — the wildly popular This Classical Life — and in 2018 she was a soloist at the Last Night of the Proms, perhaps the biggest and most prestigious event in British classical music. She was named a Member of the Order of the British Empire for her service to British music and was the first saxophonist to be signed to Decca Classics. And her debut album, Rise, hit the top spot on the UK Classical chart in 2019.

In this episode, Gillam and I talk more about her Carnegie debut and the projects she has lined up for 2023 — including the premiere of a new concerto written for her by Anna Clyne, which she'll perform with the Detroit Symphony. Plus, she shares how film, fashion, and nature fuel her creativity, her fanatical love of Nairn's oatcakes, and why there's nothing more important to her than "being as kind as possible."

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

Few careers in classical music read as illustriously as that of pianist Wu Han. For more than 50 years, her life has centered around the concert stage, delivering performances of the highest caliber in nearly every corner of the globe.

She once viewed that jet-setting lifestyle as a symbol of success earlier in her career. But these days, in her work as artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Music@Menlo, La Musica Chamber Music Festival, and the Society of the Four Arts, Wu Han's mission is to develop the next generation of classical musicians.

"Every time I hear young people with a new idea they're trying to explore, it reminds me of myself when I was their age," Wu Han says on the latest episode of the Classical Post podcast. "It really makes me feel the responsibility and the inspiration to want to move this art form forward. The next generation, their devotion and love for classical music, is where I find a lot of inspiration."

That drive to create incredible performance opportunities for young musicians is clear when looking at the artist roster for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's Winter Festival. Over the course of five concerts exploring the music and profound legacy of Franz Schubert, a mix of seasoned performers and rising stars will share the stage — including pianist Gilbert Kalish, violist Paul Neubauer, singers Joélle Harvey and Nikolay Borchev, and the Escher String Quartet.

In this episode, Wu Han and I talk more about the Winter Festival and her unique approach to programming and artist curation. Plus, she shares how ballet and the art of Renaissance Italy inspire her creativity, her favorite place in New York City's Chinatown for Cantonese fried crab, and the very important role bacon plays in her household.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

1983 proved a pivotal year in violinist Dmitry Sitkovetsky's life. That was the year the Azerbaijan-born musician became a U.S. citizen, married his wife, and bought the Stradivarius violin he still plays to this day. It was also the year he discovered Glenn Gould's final recording of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations.

That album inspired Sitkovetsky to arrange the Baroque keyboard masterpiece for string orchestra — a project that would forever change the trajectory of his career as a musical artist.

"My transcription gave me a whole other life parallel to my performing career," Sitkovetsky says on the latest episode of the Classical Post podcast. "I'm the fourth generation of professional musicians [in my family], so it was pretty much determined I should play violin and become a concert artist. But that year changed that a great deal. I diversified."

Now, 40 years later, Sitkovetsky has become a multi-hyphenate to the nth degree. In addition to his work as a solo violinist and transcriber, he's a sought-after conductor, music director, and educator; founder of the New European Strings Chamber Orchestra; and host of Medici.tv's interview series It Ain't Necessarily So — where he's sat down with some of the greatest musicians of our time, including Yefim Bronfman, Barbara Hendricks, and Sir Neville Marriner.

In this episode, we discuss how being a student of history informs Sitkovetsky's music-making and what's in store for his final season as music director of the Greensboro Symphony, an ensemble he's led for 20 years. Plus, he shares the earphones he can't live without while traveling, his favorite New York City restaurant for feasting on sturgeon and caviar, and how he sees his career as being "a keeper of the flame" for classical music.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

From dinosaurs dancing to The Rite of Spring in Disney's Fantasia to a tuxedoed Bugs Bunny performing Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, classic cartoons have long been a delightful entry point for kids of all ages to get to know classical music.

That's a tradition composer and jazz pianist Joel Pierson is breathing new life into as artistic director of The Queen's Cartoonists. Working at the crossroads of classical music, jazz, and the golden age of animation, The Queen's Cartoonists perform the scores of classic animated films from around the world, perfectly synchronizing their brilliant jazz-band arrangements with the films projected on stage.

Winning audiences over with their madcap humor and a musical palette that mixes Rossini and Strauss with Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott, the ensemble has sold out venues from the Blue Note Jazz Club to the Konzerthaus Berlin. For Pierson, the group's mission is simply to show that anyone can discover a love for classical music and jazz, given the right introduction.

"I always say we're essentially tricking people into liking classical music and jazz," Pierson says on the latest episode of the Classical Post podcast. "Of course we're playing a lot of [that] music, but that's not really how you get people in. The hook is that this is a bunch of animated films with a highly synchronized live performance by some excellent New York musicians, and people really like that."

In this episode, we talk more about Pierson's process for arranging the wide variety of music The Queen's Cartoonists performs, and he gives us a sneak peek at the group's latest project — a wildly inventive reimagining of Mozart's Requiem. Plus, he shares how travel fuels his creativity, his favorite basement beer bar in New York City, and why a bidet attachment is truly, in his words, "a life-changer."

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

The Spanish pianist Javier Perianes is racking up quite a lot of frequent flyer miles these days.

This season alone, his concert schedule has him zigzagging the globe to perform with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Dallas Symphony here in the States, Europe's Budapest Festival Orchestra and the Oslo Philharmonic, and a whirlwind trip to Australia for concerts with the Melbourne and Sydney Symphony Orchestras, among many other engagements.

And while the thrill of making music with friends and colleagues around the world is a key driver for Perianes's career, his extensive travels also provide a key element that fuels his creativity: new life experiences.

"When you're with a piece, you have big emotional landscapes — death, pain, suffering, hope, joy," Perianes shares on the latest episode of the Classical Post podcast. "Where can you get all those feelings to convey? You can't get that from others' lives. You can't imitate them. You have to have them deep inside you."

That authentic approach to performance has served Perianes well. A prolific recording artist, he's released 20 critically acclaimed albums on the Harmonia Mundi label — and he's performed with many of today's leading conductors, including Gustavo Dudamel, Klaus Mäkelä, Daniel Barenboim, and Vladimir Jurowski.

Next up for Perianes are three performances of Saint-Saëns's Fifth Piano Concerto — also known as "The Egyptian" — with the LA Phil and conductor Gustavo Gimeno. In this episode, we talk more about how he's preparing the Saint-Saëns concerto and what he hopes audiences in Los Angeles will enjoy about this seldom-heard work.

Plus, Perianes shares how short siestas and long walks to work are part of his wellness routine, the Manhattan restaurants he seeks out whenever he's performing in New York, and how defining success for him is simply to "Do what you love."

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

In early 2012, the coloratura soprano Marie-Eve Munger received an offer every opera singer dreams of — a lead role in a Mozart opera.

But there was a catch. It wasn't a role in Don Giovanni, or The Marriage of Figaro, or any of the popular Mozart operas performed every season across the globe. The opera was Il sogno di Scipione, which Mozart wrote when he was just 16 years old.

Munger had never heard of the opera before, but learning and performing it that year piqued her curiosity. How could Mozart write a compelling theatrical work like this at such a young age? And why was no one performing this music?

Now, a decade later, that interest in exploring Mozart's early operas has blossomed into a new album from the French-Canadian soprano, Maestrino Mozart — a program of rarely heard arias Mozart composed between the ages of 10 and 16, which Munger performs with Les Boréades de Montréal under the baton of Philippe Bourque.

"What I discovered in Il sogno di Scipione were incredible moments of musical depth and dramatic sense, an incredible mastery of the bel canto," Munger says on the latest episode of the Classical Post podcast. "Even at that early age, he was able to really capture the essence of what it is to be human."

Over the course of the 12 arias featured on Maestrino Mozart, Munger shows us how the popular assumption that Mozart's earliest works are too simple or juvenile is just not the case. In these teenage works, one can clearly hear the maturity the composer would develop over the next 20 years.

"[This music] sheds an interesting light on his later works as well. You can hear the seeds of Giovanni. You can hear the seeds of the Queen of the Night and Pamina. All of that is really in there already, and you can hear it. It's a very interesting way to rediscover a composer we think we know."

In this discussion, we talk more about the new album and the parallels Munger sees between performing classical music and gastronomy. Plus, she shares how her yoga practice helps her cultivate her voice, the iPad app that's transformed her life as a traveling musician, and her pick for the best burger joint in New York City.

Listen to Maestrino Mozart on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you download or stream music.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

For violinist Hilary Hahn, finding success as an international soloist has never been about sticking to the same menu of concertos by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Sibelius. Now in the fourth decade of her storied career, the three-time Grammy Award winner has consistently worked to expand the scope of the violin canon — commissioning a slate of new works from composers like Edgar Meyer, Jennifer Higdon, and Lera Auerbach.

But on Eclipse, her latest release on Deutsche Grammophon, the centerpiece of the album isn't a work written for her. In fact, it's not even by a living composer. It's the violin concerto of Alberto Ginastera — a work that's seldom performed, and one Hahn immediately fell in love with when she first heard it years ago. Ever since then, she knew she had to record it.

"It felt like one of those pieces I needed to take on for my own reasons, but also that it wasn't played very much," Hahn says on the latest episode of the Classical Post podcast. "I was enamored with the work, felt like it was written for me, even though I never met the composer. It's exactly what I like to dive into emotionally in music, and it requires a very specific relationship to the instrument that I feel is a strength of mine."

Part of the reason Hahn was eager to record the work was not only the chance to add to the concerto's story with her performance — but also to allow everyone who listens to contribute their personal perspective to the work.

"Music is a way to connect you with your own experience. As a listener, you are part of the interpretation of that music's history. When you listen to a piece, you add to the diversity of stories that it tells, just by being present in its space."

In this discussion, we talk more about Eclipse and why another work on the album, Dvořák's Violin Concerto, deserves much more time in the spotlight as well. Plus, she shares how her wellness routine is all about tuning into the daily ebb and flow of her body, and the facial massage stone that helps her undo the neck and jaw tension that comes with years of playing the violin.

Listen to Eclipse on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you stream and download music.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

Conductor Gary Thor Wedow has often found inspiration for his music-making in the visual arts. But a recent visit to an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art gave Wedow, a specialist in Baroque opera, an altogether new view of ancient Greek and Roman art — and early music.

"We used to think all Classical Greek and Roman statues were all virginally white marble," Wedow says on the latest episode of the Classical Post podcast. "But [historians] have learned that most of them were painted with a bright array of colors, which made me think so much about early music. We used to think of it as something remote, restrained, but now I feel as performers we have to find more colors and more variety."

Wedow will soon have ample opportunity to find colors and chiaroscuro — strong contrasts between light and dark — in Handel's seldom-performed opera Atalanta. Beginning on November 9, Wedow leads singers from the Juilliard Opera and the school's period-instrument ensemble, Juilliard415, in three performances of this delightful but seldom-performed work. A mythological opera written in 1736 to celebrate the wedding of England's Prince of Wales, Wedow likens Atalanta's plot to that of Hallmark Channel rom-coms, filled with comical misunderstandings, love at first sight — and a whole lot of sunny, exuberant music.

In this episode, Wedow talks more about the joy of working with young artists at Juilliard, where he serves on the Vocal Arts faculty, and how he sees the role of a conductor as "bringing the ship safely into harbor through a storm."

Plus, he shares a slew of recommendations for exploring the Queens borough of New York City — from his favorite spots for Mexican, Japanese, and eastern European food, to drinks at the Museum of the Moving Image and a trip to the grave of Mozart's notorious librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

Many classical music ensembles have only recently begun to prioritize programming works by underrepresented composers who've been unjustly lost to the sands of time. But for 20 years and counting, that's been the sole focus and mission of the ARC Ensemble and its artistic director, Simon Wynberg.

The ensemble-in-residence at Toronto's Royal Conservatory, the ARC Ensemble is among Canada's most distinguished cultural ambassadors. And since day one, its musicians and leadership have been dedicated to presenting the work of composers suppressed and marginalized under the 20th century's repressive regimes — an overwhelming mountain of music still waiting to be rediscovered.

"The thing I've taken back from all the work we've done is how much music there is to explore," Wynberg says on the latest episode of the Classical Post podcast. "All of these chamber works are there, waiting for someone with a bit of imagination — and some financial backing, too — to put these things together. There's really just a huge amount of unknown music which deserves to be incorporated."

The Grammy-nominated ARC Ensemble's latest album in its acclaimed Music in Exile series on Chandos Records shines a light on the chamber music of Alberto Hemsi, a composer and ethnomusicologist whose "whole identity was one of exile," Wynberg shares. A Sephardic Jew born in the Ottoman Empire and musically trained in Italy, Hemsi was forced into political exile multiple times throughout his lifetime. And according to Wynberg, that regular immersion in new cultures — albeit not by choice — forced Hemsi to reinvent himself as an artist, resulting in music of incredible depth and variety.

"He operated entirely outside of the European tradition. As a Sephardic Jew, he was inspired by the traditional Jewish melodies he collected, and then he infused his works with that music. So you get this astonishing new sound in a way. It's extraordinary."

In this episode, we talk more about the ARC Ensemble's unique mission and take a deeper dive into the lives of Hemsi as well as two composers recently profiled in the group's Music in Exile series: the Ukrainian nationalist Dmitri Klebanov, and Walter Kaufmann, who became a celebrated scholar of Indian classic music after fleeing to modern-day Mumbai from Nazi Germany.

Listen to Music in Exile, Vol. 5: Works by Alberto Hemsi on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you stream or download music.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.

French-Canadian baritone Etienne Dupuis is a big fan of television, especially Ted Lasso. So much so that he's adapted a key phrase from the comedy-meets-philosophy series — "Football is life!" — as a mantra to stoke people's interest in opera.

"Now I always say, 'Opera is life!'" Dupuis shares on the latest episode of the Classical Post podcast. "Bohème, Barber of Seville, Marriage of Figaro, they just feel so close to life sometimes. Opera allows us to emotionally connect together."

For Dupuis, building a larger fan base for opera means showing people that a night at the opera isn't about wearing the fanciest dress or worrying about clapping at a "wrong" moment — it's about taking part in a shared emotional experience.

"If you're so sad that you're in tears or so happy and elated that you want to stand up and clap and yell bravo, it's noble to feel that way, it's part of the experience. I always say opera should be as close to the human experience as it can be."

In this discussion, Dupuis talks more about how opera can return to its 17th-century roots as a relaxed social event everyone could enjoy, and what's on tap for him this season — including singing the title role in John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer with the composer himself on the podium. Plus, he shares the ways brainstorming and synergy can lead to creative breakthroughs, why Fisherman's Friend lozenges are in fact a singer's best friend, and where to find the best pork buns in New York City.

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Classical Post® is created and produced by ⁠Gold Sound Media⁠® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can ⁠grow your audience⁠ to make a lasting impact in your community.