Mozart Class, Mahler Class - Starting in September

Hello, everyone. While we’re still steeped in Tchaikovsky and Chamber Music, it’s already time to start thinking about fall courses. In addition to the periodic one-day What to Listen For in Music seminar, we’ve got two eight-week classical music courses in downtown Chicago starting in late September. The Mozart course is a repeat, and I’m delighted to offer a new course on Mahler. If you enjoyed my courses on Entartete Musik and fin de siècle Vienna, it should be right up your alley. I look forward to seeing some of my “regulars” and eagerly welcome any new faces in the Chicago area.

Life and Works of Mozart

9/22/2009 - 11/10/2009
Tuesday 10:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Downtown Chicago

This course will examine Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s phenomenal precociousness, his astounding assimilation of Italianate and Germanic styles, and his relationship to the turbulent social transitions of his time. Divided between biographic study and music analysis, the course will discuss seminal masterworks including selected operas, piano concerti, and symphonies.

Click here to register for the Mozart class.

Mahler

9/24/2009 - 11/12/2009
Thursday 10:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Downtown Chicago

This course focuses on the career of composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, including detailed discussions of his symphonies and song cycles as well as his influence as a conductor. The course also examines fin de siècle Vienna, including musical feuds between Brahms, Bruckner, and Hugo Wolf. And how can we ignore Vienna’s most glamorous personality, Alma Mahler (née Schindler) whose diaries are Vienna’s looking glass? Providing context, such spectacular personalities as Gustav Klimt and Sigmund Freud are discussed alongside Mahler as exemplars of an emerging modernist ethos.

Click here to register for the Mahler class.

Last Night's Mahler Sixth: a Real Review

Some Guy irately complained about my irrelevant, sophomoric, and esoteric “non-review” of last night’s performance of Mahler 6, and requested — nay, demanded — that I write a “real” review. To this reproach I can only say “Touche.” So, here is my Official Review, translated into Standard Written Criticalese

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Mahler's Popularity? He's the Antidote for Medieval (and Modern) Anonymity: the Sixth at Symphony Center

by obsessing about himself, about Gustav Mahler, personally —and for 80 glorious minutes at a time as Haitink was in no hurry — Mahler gives us, by proxy, some of our dignity back.

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