Timothy Judd, Suzuki Violin Lessons

Latest Listeners’ Club Posts

Bach’s Musical Offering: The Ricercars October 25, 2021

J.S. Bach’s monumental chamber music collection, Musikalisches Opfer (The Musical Offering), was inspired by a momentous meeting. It began on May 7, 1747 when Bach met Frederick the Great in Potsdam. At the time, J.S Bach’s son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, was employed as one of the Prussian King’s most prized musicians. Frederick gave the elder […]

Schumann’s “Nachtlied,” Op. 108: The Gentle Approach of Sleep October 22, 2021

Robert Schumann’s Nachtlied, Op. 108 for eight-part chorus and orchestra drifts into the serene, magical world of sleep. Schumann composed this autumnal choral song over the course of a week in November, 1849. It is a setting of a poem by Friedrich Hebbel (1813-1863) in which death is met first with fear and then with acceptance. The song b […]

Remembering Bernard Haitink October 22, 2021

Bernard Haitink, the renowned Dutch conductor and violinist, has passed away. He was 92. Haitink served as chief conductor of Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra from 1961 to 1988. Additionally, he was principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1967-1979), music director of the Glyndebourne Opera (1978-1988), music dire […]

Remembering Edita Gruberová October 20, 2021

Edita Gruberová, the Slovak coloratura soprano, passed away in Zurich on October 18. She was 74. Gruberová made her operatic debut in 1968 at Bratislava’s National Theatre, performing the role of Rosina in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. In 1970, she escaped communist Czechoslovakia and appeared at the Vienna State Opera as the Queen of th […]

Brahms’ String Quintet No. 2 in G Major: A First Farewell October 18, 2021

Johannes Brahms intended for the String Quintet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 111 to be his final piece. In a December, 1890 correspondence with his publisher, Simrock, the 57-year-old composer slipped in the message, “With this note you can take leave of my music, because it is high time to stop.” Around the same time, Brahms told a friend that he […]

Handel’s Fugue in A Minor, HWV 609: Haunting Chromaticism October 15, 2021

For a brief moment, Handel’s Fugue in A Minor, HWV 609 could almost be mistaken for a twentieth century tone row. The first haunting pitches of the fugue’s subject are disorienting because they leap wildly beyond an octave. The chromaticism which underlies the subject clouds the tonal center. In the second half of the subject, a descending […]

Night Voyages: Salonen’s “Insomnia” and Sibelius’ “Nightride and Sunrise” October 13, 2021

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s 2002 orchestral tone poem, Insomnia, takes us on a haunting nocturnal voyage. The opening bars slip into a restless, looping stream of musical “thoughts” which toss and turn with prickly persistence in the woodwinds. As the piece develops, the insomniac’s obsessive mental chatter becomes a colorful tonal dreamscape which […]