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Latest Listeners’ Club Posts

Bach’s “Osanna in Excelsis”: Celebrating a Milestone at The Listeners’ Club January 2, 2026

We begin the year by celebrating a milestone at The Listeners’ Club. This is our 2,000th post. I have enjoyed exploring all of this music with you during these years, and I look forward to continuing the journey. For today, I have selected the brief and festive Osanna in excelsis (“Hosanna in the highest”) which opens the fourth section of […]

“God Bless the Child”: Keith Jarrett Trio December 31, 2025

Jazz standards, music from the great American songbook, had fallen out of fashion when, in 1983, the Keith Jarrett Trio recorded Standards, Vol. 1. The album’s final track is God Bless the Child, a 1939 song by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr. Jarrett’s God Bless the Child blends elements of jazz, rock, gospel, and minimalism. It unfold […]

Remembering Gary Graffman December 29, 2025

Gary Graffman, a renowned American pianist, teacher, and administrator, passed away last Saturday, December 27, at his Manhattan home. He was 97. A child prodigy, Graffman entered the Curtis Institute of Music at the age of 7, and studied with Isabelle Vengerova. In 1946, he made his professional debut, appearing with conductor Eugene Orman […]

John Adams’ “El Niño”: “A Palm Tree” December 26, 2025

By coincidence, a recent post exploring John Adams’ El Niño was published on the 25th anniversary of the work’s premiere in Paris on December 15, 2000. Now, let’s return to El Niño to hear the nativity oratorio’s surreal final moments. In the drama, Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus are on the road to Egypt. They flee the persecution of Ki […]

Bells of Florence December 24, 2025

Merry Christmas! Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great German-American musicologist, Karl Haas, host of the nationally syndicated radio program, Adventures in Good Music. Airing between 1970 and 2007, it was radio’s most widely listened-to classical music program. Following the show’s theme music, the second movement of B […]

Arnold Bax’ “I Sing of a Maiden that is Makeless”: The Choir of Westminster Abbey December 22, 2025

Anonymously penned, the 15th century poem, I syng of a mayden, is a mystical meditation on the Annunciation and Nativity of Christ. Elements of Elizabethan polyphony blend with dreamy chromaticism in English composer Arnold Bax’ 1923 five-part a cappella setting of the text. As the five verses unfold, the majestic melody gives way to variat […]

“Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”: Keith Jarrett Trio December 19, 2025

In the notes for his album, After the Fall, American jazz pianist Keith Jarrett describes his “fall” into a bout of chronic fatigue syndrome in the fall of 1996. His return to the concert stage came on November 14, 1998 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, a venue close to his home. The title of the album, a document of the live concer […]