Showing posts with label Classics with Klaus Döring Klassik mit Klaus Döring. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Classics with Klaus Döring Klassik mit Klaus Döring. Show all posts
Sunday, January 4, 2026
Saturday, January 3, 2026
Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3 'Organ Symphony'
Camille Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78, better known as the "Organ Symphony," is one of the most significant pieces of the composer's career. Completed in 1886 for the Royal Philharmonic Society in London, it marked the composer's return to the symphonic form after years focused on other genres. In this video, the symphony is performed by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marek Janowski. The organ is played by Iveta Apkalna. The concert took place on January 22, 2013, at the Berliner Philharmonie to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Élysée Treaty between France and Germany.
(00:00) I. Adagio – Allegro moderato – Poco adagio
(19:08) II. Allegro moderato – Presto – Maestoso – Allegro
In 1857 Camille Saint-Saëns was hired as the main organist at Paris's most fashionable church, Église de la Madeleine. While the who's who of French high society met there each Sunday to worship, the composer was less interested in social status than he was in the church's magnificent organ built in 1845 by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. Indeed, the composer is said to have called to the two decades he spent at the organ's keys as the greatest years of his life. Europe's classical music elite, meanwhile, were equally impressed. The likes of German pianist and composer Clara Schumann and Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate came to listen to his dazzling improvisations, while Hungarian composer and virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt called him "the greatest organist in the world."
Yet, despite his popularity as an organist, Saint-Saëns rarely composed for the instrument. One of the exceptions is the Symphony No. 3 in C minor, the so-called "Organ Symphony." Yet even this nickname can be a bit misleading if one expects to hear the organ consistently front and center. The pipe organ enters in the latter halves of the two large sections. Yet when it does, its sound instantly reshapes the piece's sonic landscape. It's used as a foundation for the orchestra’s climactic moments, adding a weight and depth that emphasizes the final passages of the piece. This approach reflects both his mastery of orchestral color and his connection to tradition, even as he pushes the symphony forward.
With this piece, considered one of the most enduring works of the French repertoire, Camille Saint-Saëns also reshapes the traditional symphonic structure. Instead of the usual four separate movements, he created two large blocks of music where themes evolve and reappear, giving the piece a sense of unity. This unified structure echoes that of Franz Liszt's oft-analyzed Piano Sonata in B minor, which comprises a single movement that covertly holds within it four distinct movements (allegro, adagio, scherzo and finale). Saint-Saëns also employs Liszt's concept of thematic transformation, whereby different themes, aka "leitmotifs," are transformed through inversion, modulation, fragmentation and other means — and then reappear throughout the piece. Perhaps it comes as little surprise that Saint-Saëns dedicated his organ symphony to Liszt.
Based in the German capital, the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra ("Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin") is the country's second-oldest radio symphony orchestra and was founded in 1923.
Friday, January 2, 2026
Vienna New Year Concert 2026
Programme
Johann Strauß II.
Overtüre to the Operetta "Indigo and the Forty Thieves"
Carl Michael Ziehrer
Donausagen. Walzer, op. 446
Joseph Lanner
Malapou-Galoppe, op. 148
Eduard Strauß
Brausteufelchen. Polka schnell, op. 154
Johann Strauß II.
Fledermaus-Quadrille, op. 363
Johann Strauß I.
Der Karneval in Paris. Galopp, op. 100
Franz von Suppè
Ouvertüre zur Operette "Die schöne Galathée"
Josephine Weinlich
Sirenen Lieder. Polka mazur, op. 13 [Arr. W. Dörner]
Josef Strauß
Frauenwürde. Walzer, op. 277
Johann Strauß II.
Diplomaten-Polka. Polka francaise, op. 448
Florence Price
Rainbow Waltz [Arr. W. Dörner]
Hans Christian Lumbye
Københavns Jernbane-Damp-Galop
Johann Strauß II.
Rosen aus dem Süden (Roses from the South), Waltz, op. 388
Johann Strauß II.
Egyptischer Marsch (Egyptian March), op. 335
Josef Strauß
Olive Branch Waltz, op. 207
5 Composers Who Were Also Accomplished Visual Artists
From Felix Mendelssohn and his Romantic era landscapes to John Cage and his chance-driven ink washes, these five composers created drawings, sketches, and paintings that help illuminate their artistic inner worlds.
Today, we’re looking at the lesser-known art by five great composers.
Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)
Felix Mendelssohn
Mendelssohn was not just a celebrated composer; he was also a prolific visual artist.
He began taking drawing and painting lessons at an early age. Over the course of his lifetime, he produced hundreds of pieces of art in pen-and-ink, watercolour, and oils.
It’s no surprise that this child of the early Romantic era favoured subjects like dramatic natural landscapes and historic architecture.
Mendelssohn’s landscape painting
During one family tour of Switzerland in 1822, the 15-year-old Mendelssohn drew over forty ink-and-pencil landscape sketches of the Alps.
Later trips to Scotland (in 1829) and Italy (in 1831) likewise inspired numerous scenic drawings and watercolours of breathtaking locales.
He would also create memorable musical portraits of those countries, most famously with his Hebrides Overture and his Fourth Symphony, nicknamed the “Italian.”
Mendelssohn wrote in 1838 that while vacationing in Switzerland, “I composed not even a bit of music, but rather drew entire days, until my fingers and eyes ached.”
The beloved hobby allowed him to remain creative even when he was struggling with finding musical inspiration.
Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)
Composer Arnold Schoenberg is remembered best today as a composer and pioneer of atonality, but he was also a gifted Expressionist painter.
He began painting around 1907 and started focusing on the hobby in earnest months later during a particularly tumultuous period in his life.
Arnold Schoenberg
That year, his wife, Mathilde, left him for several months to have an affair with painter Richard Gerstl. After she returned to Schoenberg that November, Gerstl died by suicide.
While dealing with the emotional fallout, Schoenberg created a series of intense portraits characterised by stark colours, exaggerated features, and haunted gazes.
These paintings – which Schoenberg often titled “Gaze” or “Looking” – were meant to express something profound about his interior emotional state at the time of their creation.
He ended up aligning with the loose Vienna-based group of artists known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), named after Wassily Kandinsky’s 1903 painting of the same name.
In fact, Schoenberg showed paintings at the Heller Gallery in Vienna (1910) and in the Der Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich (1911) at Kandinsky’s invitation.
Schoenberg painted around 60–70 paintings, mostly between 1908 and 1912. After 1912, his output dipped, and he returned to focusing on music.
Arnold Schoenberg’s self portrait, “The Red Gaze”
He later mused about the connections between the two arts in an interview:
I planned to tell you what painting meant to me. In fact, it was to me the same as making music. It was to me a way of expressing myself, of presenting emotions, ideas, and other feelings.
And this is perhaps the way to understand these paintings, or not to understand them. They would probably have suffered the same fate as I have suffered; they would have been attacked. The same would happen to them that happened to my music.
I was never very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don’t know whether this is why I did it in music, and also why I did it in painting.
George Gershwin (1898–1937)
George Gershwin is famed as a composer of jazz-influenced classics, but he was also an avid painter: he created over 100 works during his lifetime.
He took up painting in 1927, encouraged by his younger brother Ira and their cousin, the artist Henry Botkin.
He worked primarily in oil painting and charcoal or pencil sketches, focusing on portraits and figure studies of the people in his world. He was especially fond of impromptu, casual portraiture.
George Gershwin, self-portrait, 1936
Among Gershwin’s best-known paintings is his portrait of his Hollywood tennis partner, fellow painter-composer Arnold Schoenberg (c. 1934–36). Today, that painting hangs in the U.S. Library of Congress.
George Gershwin painting Arnold Schoenberg
One friend, Merle Armitage, noted that Gershwin “was in love with colour and his palette in paint closely resembled the colour of his music. Juxtaposition of greens, blues, sanguines, chromes, and greys fascinated him.” Appropriate favourites for the composer of Rhapsody in Blue!
It should also be noted that Gershwin was an art collector as well as artist, owning works by Picasso, Chagall, Modigliani, Kandinsky, and others.
He even kept Mark Chagall’s painting, The Rabbi, over his piano, where he would see it every day he went to work.
It’s tantalising to think about how the aesthetics of these artists might have affected his own music.
As he once told a friend, “Painting and music spring from the same elements, one emerging as sight, the other as sound.”
Paul Hindemith (1895–1963)
Paul Hindemith, 1923
In addition to his compositions and viola-playing, German composer Paul Hindemith was known for his whimsical drawings.
Although he never formally trained as a visual artist, he drew prolifically from childhood until the end of his life.
He would regularly seize any scrap of paper at hand – menus, napkins, concert programs – and fill them with impromptu sketches and cartoons.
Hindemith’s doodles
His subjects were numerous and tended toward the bizarre: he’d portray whimsical, fantastic subjects in a cartoonish style, such as tubas with legs, cats who played musical instruments, or even dancing elephants.
Hindemith always treated his drawing as a casual, fun outlet. He never catalogued his visual art in any systematic way, or treated them as anything but throwaway doodles.
The only meticulously dated collection of Hindemith’s visual art is his series of Christmas cards, which he drew and sent out to friends, family, students, and colleagues every year. He kept up the tradition for decades, until his final Christmas in 1963.
John Cage (1912–1992)
John Cage, avant-garde composer of 4’33” fame, created a significant body of visual art during the last twenty years of his life.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Cage turned to printmaking, drawing, and watercolour as extensions of his experimental philosophy. By the time of his death, he had produced a large and distinctive oeuvre of works on paper.
Cage’s visual art is notable for applying the same principles of chance and indeterminacy that he used in music. While making his watercolours and prints, Cage would let random operations guide the creation of the works.
John Cage’s painting
As a result, Cage’s art has a uniquely serene yet unpredictable quality – splashes of colour or delicate pencil lines appear according to coin flips and computer-generated randomness, not by his own subjective aesthetic judgment.
Cage’s largest sustained visual art project was done in collaboration with the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia. Between 1983 and 1990, he spent several week-long residencies there, creating a total of 125 unique watercolours. All of them were later published in the compendium The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors.
Conclusion
The visual artworks these composers left behind are compelling in their own right, but they’re also fascinating for what they say about their creative spirit and vision.
Whether it was Mendelssohn sketching alpine peaks in Switzerland, Schoenberg confronting his inner turmoil on canvas, or Cage embracing indeterminacy with brush and ink, each of these composers used visual media to explore ideas that sound alone didn’t allow them to.
Appreciating their artwork gives us an invaluable lens for hearing – and better understanding – their remarkable music.
Friday, December 26, 2025
Happy New Year 2026 🎉 Best New Year Piano & Orchestra Instrumental Covers
Happy New Year 2026 🎉 Best New Year Piano & Orchestra Instrumental Covers
✨ Welcome to Christmas Eve Melodies ✨
A heartfelt home for sacred, warm, and uplifting Christmas music.
This channel is dedicated to bringing you traditional Christmas choir performances, orchestral arrangements, and timeless hymns that capture the beauty and wonder of the holiday season. Each piece is crafted to immerse you in an atmosphere of peace, reverence, and festive joy.
For The Patron: The Jour de Fête Quartet
by
On Fridays, the publisher Mitrofan Petrovich Belaieff had his musical gatherings, bringing together the cream of the St Petersburg composers. The earlier group, who came together around Mily Balakirev, known as the Mighty Handful, or just The Five (Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov), had done their best to embody Russian national music, but fell apart after the early death of Mussorgsky. The timber merchant Belaieff stepped forward next.
Portrait of Alexander Glazunov
Belaieff, with the family fortune in the timber industry behind him, was also a musician. He played the viola and, through Anatoly Lyadov, was introduced to Alexander Glazunov. In the early 1880s, Belaieff held Friday musical meetings for string quartet concerts at his house. Initially, they were playing through the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in chronological order, but soon Russian music was making its appearance.
Portrait of Mitrofan Belaieff by Ilya Repin
Musically, Glazunov was the new driving force behind what became known as the Second Petersburg School. Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov, Glazunov, the critic Vladimir Stassov, and many others flocked to Belaieff’s soirees. Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov, and Stassov had been important members or adjuncts to The Five. The Belaieff meetings were never cancelled. Rimsky-Korsakov recalled that if a member of the original quartet fell ill, Belaieff quickly found a stand-in. Belaieff always played the viola in the quartet.
A normal evening would include a concert at around 1 am, after which food and wine flowed. After the meal, Glazunov or someone else might play the piano, either trying out a new composition or reducing a symphonic work to a 4-hand version.
The composers would all contribute to a group project, such as the string quartet for Belaieff’s 50th birthday in 1886, composed by Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Lyadov, and Glazunov. Called the String Quartet on the Theme ‘B-la-F’, using the principal syllables of Belaieff’s last name. A year earlier, Glazunov, Lyadov, and Rimsky-Korsakov composed the three-movement ‘Jour de fête’ or ‘Name-Day Quartet’ for their patron.
For the Jour de Fête quartet, Glazunov contributed an opening movement called Les chanteurs de Noël. The Jour de Fête celebrates Christ’s birth, celebrated on January 6-7 on the Orthodox calendar. The Christmas singers bring joy to the festivities.
Felix Galimir at Marlboro
This recording was made in 1950 by the Galimir Quartet. Founded by violinist Felix Galimir (1910–1999) in 1927, the quartet was made up of him and his three sisters (Adrienne on violin, Renée on viola, and Marguerite on cello). They were the right quartet at the right time, recording Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite and the String Quartet of Maurice Ravel under the supervision of the composers, who were present during the rehearsals and recording sessions in 1936. These recordings were awarded two Grand Prix de Disques awards. After fleeing Germany because of his Jewish background, he ended up in Palestine and, together with his sister Renée, was a founding member of what would become the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1938, he moved to New York, where he re-founded the Galimir Quartet, this time with members Henry Seigl on violin, Karen Tuttle on viola and Seymour Barab on cello. In New York, he was a member of the NBC Symphony orchestra, concertmaster of the Symphony of the Air, and taught at The Juilliard School, the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and Mannes College of Music in New York. In the summers, from 1954 to 1999, he was on the faculty of the Marlboro Music Festival.
Performed by
Galimir Quartet
Recorded in 1950
Official Website
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Khatia Buniatishvili: Master Pianist or Master of Hype?
By
Khatia Buniatishvili © Gavin Evans
She has been called a “social-media pianist,” accused of cultivating an image at the expense of musical depth. These opposing narratives often clash more loudly than the music itself, revealing as much about our cultural anxieties as about Buniatishvili’s artistry.
Yet somewhere between the extremes lies a far more interesting story. How does a singular performer navigate the fault line between genuine expression and hyper-visibility of the modern classical world?
Self-Made Spotlight
What often gets lost in these polarised assessments is just how shrewd Buniatishvili has been in shaping her career. Long before the magazine covers and viral clips, she had already proven her musical calibre, placing respectably in major piano competitions and earning the approval of figures who cared little for glamour.
Yet she also understood, perhaps earlier than many of her peers, that she wasn’t playing in the same league as Yuja Wang, Daniil Trifonov, or Grigory Sokolov. The era in which runner-up prizes alone could propel a pianist to international prominence was clearly fading.
Rather than waiting for gatekeepers to grant her visibility, Buniatishvili seized the tools of modern media and made herself visible on her own terms, not as a shortcut around musicianship, but as a parallel pathway to an audience that the old model no longer reliably delivered.
Crafting a Persona
Khatia Buniatishvili
Central to this recalibrated path was her self-fashioned image, an image she cultivated with unmistakable intentionality, and something she calls “authentic vulnerability.” Buniatishvili understood that in an age saturated with content, visibility alone was meaningless unless it carried emotional charge.
So she leaned into what audiences already sensed, particularly her intensity at the keyboard, her kinetic presence, the way she seemed to play through emotion rather than merely shaping it. The visual language she adopted, including touches of cinematic glamour, was simply a way of amplifying the magnetism that was already there.
It made her instantly recognisable, fiercely memorable, and yes, sometimes controversial. But it also signalled an artist unafraid to fuse musical vulnerability with a boldly curated aesthetic that challenged long-standing expectations about virtuosity.
Digital Glamour
All of this, however, circles back to an essential point. Buniatishvili can play; everybody can these days. And she often plays with a fluency and fire that justify her broad popularity. Her sound is unmistakable, her instincts bold, and when she connects with a work, the result can be genuinely thrilling.
But the amplification provided by social media does not, in itself, confer artistic genius. Visibility is not vision. Followers are not proof of interpretative depth. The danger lies in confusing the mechanisms that propel a career with the qualities that define a great musician.
Buniatishvili’s online presence may magnify her allure, but it cannot substitute for the hard currency of musical insight. This distinction is increasingly difficult to ascertain, yet vital to maintain in the digital age.
Dual Virtuosity
Khatia Buniatishvili
In the end, Khatia Buniatishvili occupies a curious and unmistakably modern position in the classical music landscape. She is, by any reasonable measure, an able and often compelling pianist. She is certainly capable of moments of real eloquence, technical ease, and emotional charge.
But her true virtuosity may lie not only in her playing but in her ability to navigate and manipulate the currents of contemporary visibility. In a field still negotiating its relationship with image, immediacy, and digital spectacle, she has turned self-promotion into an art form of its own.
Khatia Buniatishvili has shaped her persona just as meticulously as any performance. Whether one admires or resents this dual mastery, Buniatishvili stands as a reminder that in the twenty-first century, artistry and self-fashioning travel side by side. Does hype outstrip substance? Time will tell; the debate continues.
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