Schedule

In May and June 2021, Argentinian star pianist Martha Argerich celebrated her 80th birthday performing at Château de Chantilly, France. In this concert, recorded at the festival Les Coups de Cœur de Chantilly, Argerich is joined by three musicians who are particularly close to her heart: cellist Mischa Maisky, violinist Maxim Vengerov, and pianist Iddo Bar-Shaï. They perform with the orchestra Les Siècles under the baton of Romanian-Austrian conductor Ion Marin. The concert opens with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in C major, Op. 56, with Argerich, Vengerov, and Maisky as soloists. Written in 1803, it is Beethoven’s only concerto for more than one solo instrument. This is followed by Camille Saint-Saëns’s musical suite The Carnival of the Animals (Le carnaval des animaux), featuring Argerich and Bar-Shaï as the pianists. This musical suite from 1886 consists of 14 movements, each depicting a different animal. The work was published posthumously in 1922, as Saint-Saëns was concerned that his animal miniatures, full of delightful jokes, might damage his reputation as a serious composer. This performance was recorded at Château de Chantilly, on May 4, 2021.

Pianist Elias Ackerley (United Kingdom/South Korea, 2001) performs Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23, during the final round of the Piano Edition of the Concours musical international de Montréal 2024 (CMIM). Ackerley is accompanied by the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal under the baton of Xian Zhang. This performance was recorded at Maison symphonique de Montréal.

Pianist Jakub Kuszlik (Poland, 1996) joins the CMIM ensemble, consisting of three principal strings players of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, in a performance of the first movement, Sostenuto assai – Allegro ma non troppo, of Robert Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 47. This performance took place during the chamber music round of the two-part semi-final of the Piano Edition of the Concours musical international de Montréal 2024 (CMIM). It was recorded at the Bourgie Hall of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

"It would be hard to find anything greater, more significant or more moving anywhere in musical life today: total harmony of mind and heart, poetry and outcry, fear and consolation, knowing and feeling," declared the Berne paper Der Bund after this stunning performance of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony in August 2003 by the newly founded Lucerne Festival Orchestra. Claudio Abbado had formed this ensemble from famous instrumentalists, celebrated chamber-musicians and experienced soloists from the world's best orchestras, and the event was sold out months in advance. In this performance, the magnificent soloists Eteri Gvazava (soprano) and Anna Larsson (mezzo-soprano) are accompanied by Orfeón Donostiarra choir.

The Rina Sala Gallo International Piano Competition takes place every two years in the Italian city of Monza. Founded in 1947 by Monza-born pianist Rina Sala Gallo and Brescia-born pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, the competition is one of Monza’s most prestigious cultural events today. This broadcast featuring the three finalists’ best performances from the competition’s 26th edition, were recorded at the Villa Reale di Monza in October 2022. First, Young Sun Choi (South Korea, 1991) performs Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 106. After, Seunghyuk Na (South Korea, 1997) plays ‘Oiseaux tristes’ and ‘Alborada del gracioso’ from Maurice Ravel’s five-movement suite Miroirs. Next, Ivan Bašić (Serbia, 1996) performs Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1. Lastly, Choi returns for a performance of Claude Debussy’s Images (Book I).

In the summer of 2019, the Utrecht Early Music Festival explored the musical legacy of Naples: a cultural metropolis of contradiction and solidarity. In the documentary 'Napoli – Music’s Forgotten Capital', festival co-curator Thomas Höft unearths riveting tales from this multi-faceted city.

Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) composed nine books of madrigals in half a century, which helped transform the genre from the polyphonic, a cappella madrigals of the late Renaissance to the ‘concertato’ madrigals of the early Baroque, shifting the style’s focus to the ability of music to express emotions contained in a text. In 2011, British tenor Paul Agnew and renowned Baroque ensemble Les Arts Florissants started recording eight books of Monteverdi’s madrigals. In this program, Agnew leads Les Arts Florissants in the madrigals of Book III. Published in 1592, the book contains twenty madrigals for five voices. This performance was recorded at the Cité de la musique in Paris, France, in 2012.

An expressionistic serenade as the prelude to a thrilling festival week: this was the task assigned to Manfred Cordes and Weser-Renaissance Bremen. In Giovanni De Macque – one of the finest madrigalists of the period around 1600 – they found the perfect partner. De Macque, born in Valenciennes, was trained in Naples and evolved from conservative to experimental, writing multicoloured, evocative music on texts about ecstasy and broken hearts.

Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37 - Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 in E major. Alfred Brendel (piano), Lucerne Festival Orchestra; conductor: Claudio Abbado. The Lucerne Festival is one of the world's biggest and most important music festivals. Its history began with the inaugural concert on 25 August 1938 conducted by Arturo Toscanini. In 2003, Claudio Abbado, who had been a regular guest at the festival since 1966, became director of the newly founded Lucerne Festival Orchestra. Until his death in January 2014 he inspired his "orchestra family" to play top-class performances. The Lucerne Festival Orchestra consists of musicians of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and of international soloists.

Beethoven’s last three sonatas – Opus 109, 110 and 111 – explore the intimate meanders of the human soul, from despair to transfiguration. At the time of their composition, Beethoven was already locked in himself by his deafness. This deeply affected his relationship to others and to the world. This "psychological framework" is explored by director Mariano Nante, setting pianist Alexandre Tharaud in a film inspired by the universe of Tarkovski. Filmed in abandoned castles, and lit by director of photography Yorgos Arvanitis, this work evokes solitude and introspection and offers an inner journey through images and music.

Since his spectacular debut recital at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in 2002, pianist Misha Fomin has become an indispensable part of Dutch musical life. National and international press praise his playing for its fluently natural virtuosity, rich color palette, and great musical intelligence. In this concert, recorded at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Fomin performs a number of pieces including Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1874). The movements are separated by the Promenade: a recurring, varied theme that evokes the walk from one painting to the next. The various promenades are variations on the same theme, which recurs in two other movements (Cum mortus in lingua mortua and The Bogatyr Gates (In the Capital in Kiev)). Mussorgsky wrote this cycle in three weeks’ time in 1874. When Mussorgsky visited the exhibition of his friend, the late painter Viktor Hartmann, he wrote to a friend that “sounds and ideas hung in the air, I am gulping and overeating, and can barely manage to scribble them on paper.”

String quartet Cuarteto Mendelssohn de BP, in its 2018 configuration of violinists Olga Artyugina and Eva Rabchevska, violist Bella Chic and cellist Hayk Sukiasyan, performs Edvard Grieg’s String Quartet in G minor, Op. 27. Completed in 1878, it is the composer’s second attempt in the genre. His first string quartet, written in the early 1860s, was lost, and the third one was left incomplete at the composer’s death. Grieg based the main theme of the quartet on the song ‘Spillemænd’ (Minstrels, from Six songs, Op. 25), appearing in all four movements. This performance was recorded at Auditorio Sony of the Reina Sofía School of Music in Madrid, Spain, on May 17, 2018.

French conductor Adrien Perruchon leads the Flanders Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Maurice Ravel’s famous Boléro. The Boléro, one of the world’s most popular classical pieces, was commissioned by Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein. She asked the composer to create ballet music of a Spanish character. Ravel’s 1928 composition is inspired by the bolero, a Spanish dance in 3/4 time that originated from the 18th century. Ravel’s piece is characterized by a prominent, unchanging rhythm played on the snare drum, which continues throughout the piece. This performance was recorded in Belgium at Concertgebouw Brugge on March 1, 2017.

The Ensemble Bios performs "Il Viaggio di Dante" by Japanese-Canadian composer Rita Ueda. This performance was recorded in 2021 in the Teatro Niccolini in Florence, Italy. Ueda is one of the many faces of contemporary Canadian classical music. Ueda was born in Japan, but emigrated to Canada in 1971, with her family. There she studied composition and sound design. One of her teachers was Morton Subotnick, who wrote the first electronic piece ever commissioned by a record label (Nonesuch). With her piece "Snowflakes Return to the Sky", Ueda won second prize in the Gustav Mahler Composition Competition 2010/11.

Fabio Luisi conducts the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in this powerful performance taken from the 150th Anniversary celebrations of Denmark’s national composer, Carl Nielsen. Alongside Nielsen’s inscrutably ironic Symphony No. 6, this performance features world-renowned French pianist Lise de la Salle as soloist in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 4. This lesser-known concerto saw three separate iterations throughout the composer’s life and is characterized by bold chromaticism and a distinctly Jazz-like quality. Luisi and de la Salle have prior experience with this piece, having previously performed and recorded it together. This performance was recorded at the DR Koncerthuset in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2017.

The 2017 Prague Spring festival is brought to a powerful close as Krzysztof Penderecki conducts the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra and Slovak Philharmonic Choir in a performance of his monumental seventh symphony "Seven Gates of Jerusalem". This work bears witness to an introspective thought about faith, written in honour of the city of Jerusalem, for soloists, choir and orchestra, with libretto taken from Old Testament. For expressive purposes, Penderecki uses specific instruments: the tubaphone, percussive objects designed by the composer himself, and the shofar, an ancient Jewish liturgical instrument. Soloists for this performance include Iwona Hossa (soprano), Karolina Sikora (soprano), Anna Lubanska (mezzo-soprano), Adam Zdunikowsk (tenor), Piotr Nowacki (bass) and David Švehlík (speaker). Also featured in the programme is a rendition of the "Serenade for Orchestra" by Czech composer Isa Krejci. Recorded at Smetana Hall in Prague, Czech Republic.

Azerbaijan-born artist Seljan Nasibli moved to England at an early age, where she was encouraged to take up music. Although Nasibli chose to sing jazz, her Oxford teachers heard an operatic tendency in her voice and advised to train classically. Nasibli completed her studies at The Royal College of Music, where she graduated with a master's degree in Vocal Performance. In this episode of Stingray Originals, Nasibli performs three of Giacomo Puccini's most beautiful arias: 'Signore, ascolta!' and 'Tu, che di gel sei cinta' from the opera Turandot, and 'Quando m'en vo' (Musetta's Waltz) from the opera La bohème.

In Close Call your smartphone is a musical instrument. And you are not just an audience member, but a musician in a crazy band with three drummers! Arthur Wagenaar is a Dutch composer and musician. He has a deep love for rock bands, theatre, opera and classical music, and his music is usually a mixture of all of this. He also loves to invent his own instruments, mechanical or electronic, such as the “rampaphone,” a string instrument nine meters in length, the “kleurwerper,” played by juggling, and of course the Close Call Live app. In this performance from Classical:NEXT! in Rotterdam, he is supported by Joep Hendrickx, Tjalling Schrik, Marijn Korff de Gidts, Boy van Ooijen, Dodó Kis, Sarah Jeffery, Lotte Pen, Matthias Konrad, and Axel Schappert.

Can we get into Beethoven’s creative mind, especially in the last phase of his life, when he was coping with severe hearing loss? Tom Beghin’s new recording of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas Opus 109, 110, and 111 is an artistic exploration of how Beethoven’s musicking was shaped by the work environment he created with the help of colleagues and friends. Not only does pianist Tom Beghin perform Beethoven’s trilogy of pianistic masterpieces on a magnificent new replica of Beethoven’s Broadwood piano, he uses a reconstruction of the Gehörmaschine that was mounted on the composer’s piano so he could continue to create music as his hearing declined. ‘You do hear better when you bring your head under this machine, don’t you?’ André Stein asked Beethoven. Two centuries later, we too can bring our heads under the machine and wonder: Do we hear Beethoven differently? Beghin draws us inside the hearing machine, where we feel as well as hear the essence of Beethoven’s rambunctious and irresistibly poetic musical vibrations. Inside the Hearing Machine invites us into the multisensory playground of a deaf composer for whom the machine was more than a hearing aid and who interacted with his instrument through much more than sound.

Tenor Zhuohan Sun (China, 1993) and pianist Sara Pavlovic (Serbia, 1996) perform ‘Ehetanzlied’ from Alexander von Zemlinsky’s Sechs Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 10; ‘Nell’ from Gabriel Fauré’s Trois mélodies, Op. 18; ‘Net, tol'ko tot, kto znal’ (None but the lonely heart) from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Six Romances, Op. 6; Franz Schubert’s Die Mutter Erde, D. 788; Bart Visman’s Vermeer’s Gold; ‘Bonne journée’ from Francis Poulenc’s Tel jour, telle nuit, FP 86; and ‘Der Jäger’ from Hugo Wolf’s Mörike-Lieder, during the semi-finals of the International Vocal Competition 2021 – Lied Duo. This performance was recorded at Het Noordbrabants Museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands.