Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

By Joshua Weilerstein

Arts Performing Arts Music

What's Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast about?

Sticky Notes is a classical music podcast for everyone, whether you are just getting interested in classical music for the first time, or if you've been listening to it and loving it all your life. Interviews with great artists, in depth looks at pieces in the repertoire, and both basic and deep dives into every era of music. Classical music is absolutely for everyone, so let's start listening! Note - Seasons 1-5 will be returning over the next year. They have been taken down in order to be re-recorded in improved sound quality!

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What Does an Opera Director...

03.23.2023

Have you ever wondered what exactly goes on behind the scenes putting together an opera? Have you ever asked yourself how a director make decisions on how to interpret the libretto of an opera? Why do some productions look so ...

Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast episodes:

03.23.2023 What Does an Opera Director Really Do? W/ Tabatha McFadyen Have you ever wondered what exactly goes on behind the scenes putting together an opera? Have you ever asked yourself how a director make decisions on how to interpret the libretto of an opera? Why do some productions look so ...
03.16.2023 The Life and Music of Clara Schumann Clara Schumann, without a doubt, was one of the greatest pianists of all time. Schumann’s playing didn’t just leave critics and audiences in raptures, it also left other composers amazed that their music could sound so beautiful. Liszt called her ...
03.09.2023 So What's It Like To Be The Principal Horn Of The Berlin Philharmonic? W/ Stefan Dohr Stefan Dohr is one of the greatest french horn players in the world today. He has been the Principal Horn of the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the world's greatest orchestras, since 1993. In this really fun interview, Stefan and I ...
03.02.2023 Brahms Symphony No. 1 Brahms was only 20 years old when Robert Schumann wrote his famous Neue Bahnen(New Paths) article that proclaimed Brahms as the future of music and the heir of Beethoven. Beethoven had only been dead for 26 years at this point, ...
02.23.2023 Debussy String Quartet Just one year before Debussy wrote his legendary Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, he completed another groundbreaking work. It was a string quartet, which he expected to be the first of many. But in the end, it would ...
02.16.2023 A Conversation with Martin Fröst: "The Highest Feeling You Can Get is that Someone Got Better" Martin Fröst very well may be the greatest living clarinetist. His brilliant sound, feats of virtuosity, eclectic taste, and amazing performing ability has made him a superstar in the classical music world. I recently worked with Martin in Spain and ...
02.09.2023 Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring, Part 2 By as early as 1909, composers like Mahler knew that tonality was reaching its breaking point, and composers like Debussy were experimenting with colors and ideas a composer like Brahms wouldn’t have dreamed were possible. Strauss was shocking the world ...
02.02.2023 Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring, Part 1 The most famous thing about Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is the riot that took place at its premiere. Perhaps its overcompensating for classical music's reputation for being a bit stuffy, but musicians and musicologists LOVE talking about the riot ...
01.27.2023 Stravinsky: Petrouchka If you listened to my show last week about Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird, you know that Stravinsky’s life was never the same after the premiere of the ballet in 1910. Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes and Stravinsky’s ...
01.19.2023 Stravinsky: The Firebird In 1906, the impresario Sergei Diaghilev created a sensation in Paris with an exhibition of Russian Art. This was the first time a major showing of Russian art had appeared in Paris, and from this point forward, the city was ...
01.12.2023 Pavel Haas, Symphony This February, I have the great honor of joining the Indianapolis Symphony for the North American premiere of Pavel Haas’ remarkable unfinished symphony. Pavel Haas, a Czech Jewish composer, wrote the existing music for his symphony between 1940 and 1941 ...
12.22.2022 Vivaldi, The Four Seasons Ask a non-classical music fan to name a piece of classical music. If they don’t say Beethoven 5, or the Ode to Joy, they probably will say The Four Seasons. They might not know that it was written by Vivaldi, ...
12.15.2022 Chopin Etudes (and Godowsky!) You might be thinking, "Why on earth would anyone want to devote an entire podcast to etudes?" For most instrumentalists, etudes are the bane of our existence. They are studies, meant to develop technique on an instrument. Etudes are an ...
12.08.2022 Schubert Cello Quintet In the late summer or early autumn of 1828, Schubert completed an extraordinary work, his String Quintet in C Major. 6 weeks later, he was dead. Nowadays this piece is considered to be one of the most sublime 50 minutes ...
12.01.2022 The Music of Film Composers Film music began as a solution to a problem. Early film projectors were really loud, therefore something was needed to cover up all the noise. In addition, silent movies apparently seemed a bit awkward without any musical accompaniment. Enter, usually, ...
11.25.2022 Janacek Sinfonietta Along with Antonin Dvorak and Bedrich Smetana, Leos Janacek is known as one of the three great Czech composers. He was born in Moravia, part of the Austrian Empire at the time, and became passionately interested in studying the folk ...
11.17.2022 The Degenerates: Music Suppressed By The Nazis The center of Western Classical Music, ever since the time of Bach, has been modern-day Germany and Austria. You can trace a line from Bach, to Haydn to Mozart to Beethoven to Schubert to Schumann, Brahms, and Wagner, and finally ...
11.03.2022 David Krauss, Principal Trumpet of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra David Krauss is the Principal Trumpet of the Met Opera orchestra, and in this conversation, we talked about his beginnings on the trumpet, the differences between playing in a symphonic orchestra vs. an opera orchestra, how to manage the vast ...
10.27.2022 Beethoven Op. 18 String Quartets, Part 2 Note: This episode will be a lot more enjoyable if you listen to Part 1 first! As we turn towards the final three quartets of the set, we’ll see a lot of the same characteristics of the first 3; a ...
10.20.2022 Beethoven Op. 18 String Quartets, Part 1 In 1798, Beethoven, all of 28 years old, was about to begin a project that would take him to the last days of his life, a project that would result in some of the most far-reaching, most cosmic, most life-affirming, ...
10.13.2022 Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1 In almost every one of the past shows I’ve done about Shostakovich, the name Joseph Stalin is mentioned almost as much as the name Dmitri Shostakovich, and of course, there’s a good reason for that. Shostakovich’s life and music was ...
10.06.2022 10 Pieces You've (Probably) Never Heard, But Need to Listen To! Everyone knows Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Even if United Airlines hadn’t made the piece ubiquitous, it seems like the one piece of classical music almost everyone knows besides the beginning of Beethoven’s 5th symphony is Rhapsody in Blue. But did ...
09.29.2022 Ives, "Three Places in New England" In 1929, the conductor Nicolas Slonimsky contacted the American composer Charles Ives about performing one of his works. This was a bit of a surprise for Ives, since he had a checkered reputation among musicians and audience members, if they ...
09.22.2022 Louise Farrenc Symphony No. 3 In the mid 19th century, the way to make yourself famous in France as a composer was to write operas. From Cherubini, to Meyerbeer, to Bizet, to Berlioz, to Gounod, to Massenet, to Offenbach, to Saint Saens, to foreign composers ...
09.15.2022 Saint-Saens, The Carnival Of The Animals In 1922 a review appeared in the French newspaper Le Figaro: “We cannot describe the cries of admiring joy let loose by an enthusiastic public. In the immense oeuvre of Camille Saint-Saëns, The Carnival of the Animals is certainly one ...
09.08.2022 Brahms Symphony No. 4 Welcome to Season 9 of Sticky Notes! We're starting with a bang this season with Brahms' incomparable 4th symphony. This symphony takes the listener on a journey that unexpectedly ends in a legendarily dramatic and stormy way. What would compel ...
08.04.2022 Mozart, The Music, The Myth, The Legend, w/ Jan Swafford "I think Mozart just really loved people." - Jan Swafford. For the Season 8 Finale, I had the great pleasure of welcoming back Jan Swafford, the great writer on music, who has written a spectacular new biography of Mozart. In ...
07.28.2022 The Life and Music of George Gershwin George Gershwin’s story is like the story of so many American immigrants. His mother and father, Moishe and Rose Gershowitz, were Russian Jews who came to New York City in the 1890s looking for a better life and to escape ...
07.21.2022 Haydn Symphony No. 94, "Surprise" If you want to understand how a symphony works, look no further than the works of the Father of the symphony, Joseph Haydn. In 1790, a concert promoter and impresario named Johann Peter Solomon showed up un-announced at the Vienna ...
07.14.2022 Derrick Skye: "Prisms, Cycles, and Leaps" w/ Derrick Skye Derrick Skye is one of the most creative, innovative, and brilliant composers of our time. His orchestral work, Prisms, Cycles, and Leaps is a musical thrill ride spanning influences from literally all over the world, from West African Music, Balkan ...
07.07.2022 The Music of Olivier Messiaen There is one composer who I’ve never devoted a full show to that fills me with the same devotion and ecstasy as the people who claim that Wagner almost immediately dissolves them into tears. His music is widely played, but ...
06.30.2022 Dvorak Symphony No. 8 Bucolic. Sunny. Cheerful. Joyous. Folksy. Ebullient. Thrilling. These are all words that I found while researching Dvorak’s 8th symphony. Dvorak’s gift for writing the most gorgeous of melodies is on full display in his 8th symphony, a piece that has ...
06.23.2022 Mendelssohn Symphony No. 4, "Italian" How does a composer capture the spirit of a country, especially if it's not his native land? Mendelssohn, in his Italian Symphony, gives us one of the best examples of someone doing just that, giving us a tightly integrated, yet ...
06.16.2022 Brahms Piano Quartet in G Minor (+Schoenberg!) Today I’m going to be talking about one piece, but in two different ways. I’m going to start today with an in-depth look at Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G Minor, an early piece of his that reveals an incredible sense ...
06.09.2022 Berio Folk Songs In 1964, the popular 20th century composer Luciano Berio was commissioned by Mills College in California to write a piece for voice and chamber orchestra. What Berio came up with is one of his most remarkably creative works, which is ...
06.02.2022 Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 It’s very easy to compare Sergei Prokofiev to Dmitri Shostakovich. They are the two most famous representatives of Soviet and Russian music of the 20th century, they lived around the same time, and their music even has some similarities, but ...
05.26.2022 Mozart Piano Concerto No. 24 Imagine writing a concerto that prompted Beethoven to remark to a friend: “we’ll never be able to write anything like that. Or a piece that prompted Brahms to call it: “a masterpiece of art, full of inspiration and ideas.” Or ...
05.19.2022 The Life and Music of Florence Price Today I’ve got a pretty special show for you. It’s set up in two parts, with the first part featuring an interview, and the second part will be a more typical Sticky Notes analysis of a specific piece. Why did ...
05.12.2022 Mahler Symphony No. 9, Part 4 Mahler once said this to Bruno Walter, his protege and great advocate of Mahler’s works: "What one makes music from is still the whole—that is the feeling, thinking, breathing, suffering, human being” You could almost just stop there with the ...
05.05.2022 Mahler Symphony No. 9, Part 3 It's easy to forget that Mahler, for all of his ubiquitous success nowadays, was much better known as a conductor during his life than as a composer. He had basically one major success in his compositional career: a performance of ...
04.28.2022 Mahler Symphony No. 9, Part 2 Remember where we ended in the first movement of Mahler's 9th symphony? After a 27 minute farewell which touched on the two poles of rage and acceptance, while filling in every conceivable emotion in between, we ended in total peace, ...
04.14.2022 Mahler Symphony No. 9, Part 1 Two events, occurring on the same day, drove Mahler to the brink. His daughter Maria died at the age of just 4, and Mahler himself was diagnosed with a heart condition that would prove to be fatal. He became consumed ...
04.07.2022 Shostakovich String Quartet No. 4 Shostakovich is one of the easiest composers to do podcasts about because his life and his music is full of such incredible stories. But as easy as it is, it's also complicated. Shostakovich's music is sometimes heard as a musical ...
03.31.2022 Barber Adagio For Strings Barber’s Adagio seems to access a deep well of sadness, heartache, passion, and nostalgia in the listener that is very difficult to explain. As dozens of commentators have noted, there is nothing in particular in the piece which is particularly ...
03.24.2022 Schubert Symphony No. 8, "Unfinished" There are many reasons why Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony remains a mystery to this day - the literally unfinished form, the unusual way of the symphony's emergencee into public consciousness, and probably most importantly, the character of the music itself, which ...
03.17.2022 Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 Brahms’ two piano concertos could not possibly be any more different. The first, written when Brahms was just 25, is dramatic, stormy, and impulsive. This makes sense seeing at it was written practically as a direct response to the attempted ...
03.10.2022 Rachmaninoff: The Isle of the Dead How do you orchestrate a painting? How do you take the detail and the visual imagery of a painting and translate that into something that is so vivid that even if you’ve never seen the painting before in your life, ...
03.02.2022 The Music of Ukrainian Composers While the inspiration for the show today is likely obvious, I’m also very happy to get the chance to share this wonderful music with you, separate from the current horrors going on right now. Here’s a little quiz for you ...
02.24.2022 Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 In 1888, Tchaikovsky’s 5th symphony was premiered. It was enthusiastically received by the audience, and by Tchaikovsky’s friends. But Tchaikovsky’s nemesis, the critics, were not so happy with the piece. One utterly tore apart the symphony, writing after a performance ...
02.17.2022 Fauré Requiem In 1902, the great French composer Gabriel Faure said this: “It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see ...

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