Expand your horizons with classical music

“Dissecting love and jealousy within different social classes, Salieri's 'La scuola de' gelosi', premiered in Venice in 1778, was a great success of the composer's, and had Goethe among its admirers, praising "an astonishing richness and variety" of the music. After the 'Dance of the flowers' by Amy Beach, a composer much inspired by poetry in her work, we listen to a scene from the 1928 ballet 'Apollon musagète', composed by Igor Stravinsky. Choreographed by Adolph Bolm in Washington, and by George Balanchine in the Paris reprise (with costumes by Coco Chanel in the 1929 production), it tells the story of Apollo, god of poetry and light, as he is visited by the Muses. Florence Price's 'Moon Bridge' was composed in 1930 as part of a set of 44 art songs. She put into music words by the poet Mary Rolofson Gamble. Then we hear a classic, Offenbach's 'Barcarolle', but in a swing version rearranged by Frankie Carle. Follows Germaine Tailleferre's 'Arabesque' for clarinet and piano, a short melody that the 20th-century French composer adapted from her own opera 'The Little Mermaid'. Then we hear an aria sung by the archangel Uriel in Joseph's Haydn masterpiece, 'The Creation', composed as the 18th century was about to end. Tonight's mixtape ends with Tchaikovsky's Piano Concert No. 2. Written in 1879-80, the piece was dedicated to pianist Nikolai Rubinstein "in recognition of his magnificent playing of my First Concerto and of my Sonata, which left me in utter rapture after he performed it for me," wrote the composer. But Rubinstein died before he could create the concerto. So then the piece received its world premiere in New York City in 1881, performed by Madeline Schiller. _________________ Producer: Julien Rosa”