This Week in Classical Music: July 20, 2026.  Francesco Corteccia.  To think of it, it’s rather strange that Florence was never a musical center of Renaissance Italy.  It’s no surprise that Rome was the most important city, musically and in almost every other way.  But Ferrara was also very important, as were Mantua and Milan.  And so was Venice, of course.  Florence, on the other hand, which was uniquely rich in practically every other way – its painters, sculptors, architects, poets, writers, philosophers were the best, or among the best, in Italy – didn’t have a comparable music culture.  Things got better at the end of the 16^th century, between the Renaissance and the Baroque, when opera was invented, and composers such as Jacopo Peri and Emilio de' Cavalieri worked on creating new musical idioms, but until that time, it was Francesco Corteccia who stood alone as the significant Florentine composer of the Renaissance.  He was born in Florence on July 27^th of 1502.  He lived all his rather uneventful life in Florence.  All his work was dedicated to Duke (later, Grand Duke) Cosimo I de’ Medici, under whose patronage he worked most of his life.  Corteccia was a choirboy at the Baptistry (the one next to the Duomo), where he eventually became the chaplain.  He studied the organ at the Duomo and later worked there as maestro di capella.  He also held the same position at the Medici family’s church of San Lorenzo.

Corteccia published three volumes of madrigals, his main secular output.  He also wrote several intermedi, the sung interludes between the acts of plays; these intermedi eventually evolved into opera.  The ones staged at the court were lavish, and the music was appropriately elaborate.  As all composers of the time, he also wrote church music: motets, two Passions (St. John and St. Matthew, as Bach did two centuries later), hymns, and other pieces.  We can hear two of Corteccia’s madrigals, Fammi pur guerr' amor (Make war on me, Love), here, and Io vorrei pur fuggir, crudel amore (I would truly want to flee, cruel love), here.  And from Corteccia’s church music, Tenebrae factae sunt (Darkness fell) (here), followed by Caligaverunt oculi mei (My eyes are darkened), here.  Corteccia died in Florence in 1571.  We don’t have Corteccia’s portrait, but show instead the famous portrait of his patron, Duke Cosimo I, which was painted by the Italian Mannerist painter Bronzino sometime around 1545.  Bronzino was born one year after Corteccia, in 1503, and died one year later, in 1572.  Mannerism isn’t in vogue these days, but Bronzino was a great painter.

The Spanish composer Enrique Granados was born on July 27^th of 1867; the Hungarian composer, pianist and conductor, Ernst von Dohnányi, exactly 10 years later.  We have to admit that Dohnányi isn’t one of our favorite composers, but recently, for the first time, we heard his Sextet for Clarinet, Horn, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Piano and liked it a lot.  You can listen to it here.

Of the performers, Leon Fleisher, one of the greatest among the American pianists, was born on July 23 of 1928, in San Francisco.  He lost the use of his right hand to focal dystonia in 1964, but the recordings he made in the previous 15 years are priceless.  Also, Isaac Stern, whom we mentioned in connection with Pinchas Zukerman’s birthday last week, was born on July 21^st of 1920.

This Week in Classical Music: July 13, 2026.  Henze at 100, Part II.  We interrupted our story of Hans Werner Henze to celebrate America’s 250^th anniversary, Mahler’s birthday, and some other events, so now we’ll get back to the German composer, who, we admit, repulses and fascinates us at the same time.   

In our first post, we stopped at the revolutionary year of 1968, when Henze was living in Italy and joined the Communist Party, then the largest in Western Europe; we also wrote about the scandal surrounding the premiere of his oratorio Das Floß der Medusa, dedicated to Che Guevara.  Much of his music written during that period, even the instrumental pieces, were openly political, and the vocal music was much more so.  His Sixth Symphony, which Henze composed while in Havana and premiered there, incorporates tunes from many leftist songs and marches, but if you listen to it, musically it’s a thoroughly modernist piece; one wonders how the Cuban communist authorities reacted to it: it’s no Socialist Realism.  Still in Cuba, Henze followed up with El Cimarrón (The Runaway Slave), a long work for baritone, the guitar, flute and percussion, based on a highly politicized text by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a fellow German.  Again, politically it’s akin to Soviet agitprop, but again, musically an interesting piece. Some years later, when he was back in Italy, Henze wrote Voices, a cycle of 22 songs set to texts by Bertolt Brecht, the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and others.  Probably his most political work was the opera We Come to the River, based on an awfully violent libretto by the English playwright Edward Bond. 

Henze’s work mellowed somewhat in the late 1970s, while remaining political.  He wrote a Requiem in 1990, several operas and symphonies (his Ninth was choral, like the more famous one, and set to the text of Anna Seghers, a German communist writer who lived in East Germany).  Henze also worked on promoting contemporary music: he founded festivals of new music in Montepulciano and Munich, taught composition in Cologne and at a workshop in Austria.  Later in his life, he received many prizes and honors.  Henze died in 2012, aged 86. 

Here’s the second movement from Henze’s Symphony no 6, Lento.  The Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Marek Janowski. 

We’d also like to note several birthdays that happen this week.  Pinchas Zukerman will turn 78 on July 16^th.  He was born in Tel Aviv, went to music school there, and in 1961 was heard by Isaac Stern and Pablo Casals.  Stern suggested that he go to Juilliard, and Zukerman moved to the US in 1962, with Stern serving as his legal guardian.  While Zukerman was one of the best violinists of the last 60 years, he was also a great violist; he played this instrument in duos with Stern on several occasions.  He often performed with his friends Daniel Barenboim, Jacqueline du Pré, Itzhak Perlman, and Zubin Mehta.  Here’s Zukerman and Perlman joining Stern in Vivaldi’s Concerto for Three Violins celebrating Stern’s 60th anniversary.  Zubin Mehta conducts the New York Philharmonic. 

The Italian tenor Carlo Bergonzi was born on July 13^th of 1924 near Cremona.  He started as a baritone but eventually found his real voice, the tenor.  He sang at La Scala, the Met (for 30 years), and at practically all other major opera houses.  He performed at the same time as Franco Corelli, Mario del Monaco and Giuseppe Di Stefano during the golden age of Italian singing.  His top notes may not have been as thrilling, but he was an excellent musician, and at his best, Bergonzi was on par with the greatest.  Here’s his Celest Aida, recorded in 1975.  The New Philharmonia Orchestra is conducted by Nello Santi. 

This Week in Classical Music: July 6, 2026.  250^th Anniversary, Alex Ross, Gustav Mahler (and Henze will have to wait).  Fourth of July two days ago was a momentous event: the US turned 250.  Classical music came rather late to this country, which, in its early years, was much more concentrated on fighting wars, building itself up, absorbing new immigrants, and growing in every way possible.   There were few prominent American composers in the 19^th century and none of the caliber of the Europeans of that time.  Louis Moreau Gottschalk was one of the earliest, but he spent much of his life overseas and was more famous as a pianist than a composer.  Arthur Foote, Victor Herbert, and Edward MacDowell wrote some interesting music, and of course, Amy Beach.  Charles Ives was probably the first world-class composer born in the US.  While there was a dearth of native composers, by the mid-19th century civic society had organized itself to create an environment conducive to public music-making.  The oldest symphony orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, was created in 1842.  Many more followed closer to the end of the century: St. Louis Symphony in 1880, Boston Symphony a year later, then Detroit Symphony (1887), Chicago Symphony (1891), Cincinnati Symphony (1895), Pittsburgh Symphony (1895), and Philadelphia Symphony in 1900.  By the 20^th century, the US, and New York in particular, became central to classical music.  It was also a haven for musicians and composers fleeing turmoil in Europe, first the Russian Revolution of 1917, and then the Nazi takeover of Germany.  We’re not going to recount the history of 20th-century music in America; suffice it to say, it was brilliant.  

We’re afraid things are not as auspicious these days.  Even though there’s a plethora of very talented musicians, classical music itself is in decline.  The distance between the days when hundreds of thousands of pianos were sold every year to today, when sales of acoustic pianos are less than 1,800, is enormous.  But it’s the loss of place in our culture that classical music has suffered in the last several decades, a loss that accelerated since 2020.  It is a most consequential development, and this brings us to Alex Ross.  Till last week, Ross was the music critic of The New Yorker magazine, probably the best music critic in the country, and clearly, the most famous one, especially now that the New York Times doesn’t have a permanent classical music critic on staff.  Ross resigned his position on June 29th, citing his desire to stay closer to home (he lives in LA).  He’ll continue with the magazine, writing about other cultural matters.  Unfortunately, we don’t buy Rr. Ross’s explanation.  We think that if he felt that his writings were still relevant, that they’re needed, he would’ve stayed.  This is no longer the case.  There was a time when musical events were displayed on the front page of the NY Times.  Today, even the best concerts don’t register.  We’ve written about the decline of classical music many times and shouldn’t beat a dead horse, but Alex Ross’s resignation is highly symbolic.  It closes a chapter. 

Gustav Mahler, who was born on July 7^th of 1860, is one of the greatest and most consequential composers in the history of music.  For no fault of his own, he also became one of the most politicized figures.  During the epidemic of wokeness/DEI that took over the country in 2020, his music practically disappeared from stage and radio waves.  In a sign that wokeness is on a descent, his music reappeared and is being played again.  Why Mahler’s music turned into such a litmus test is a mystery to us.  Not that it was attacked directly, while even Beethoven himself was, but there’s something in his music that is incompatible with the woke establishment’s taste and perception.  

If you want to listen to some of his music, please browse our library. 

This Week in Classical Music: June 29, 2026.  Henze at 100.  July 1 will mark the 100^th birthday anniversary of Hans Werner Henze, a prolific and talented German composer.  He was born in Gütersloh, Westphalia, the eldest of the six children of a schoolteacher.  And here we’ll digress.  Several prominent 20th-century composers were active politically, and most invariably, on the left: for example, just three weeks ago, we wrote about Erwin Schulhoff, an Austrian-Czech composer who turned radically left late in his career and accepted Stalin’s Socialist Realism as his credo.  He’s remembered, and rightfully so, as a victim of Nazism, but that doesn’t negate his objectionable politics.  Hanns Eisler was part of the Left from an early age in Germany.  The Nazi takeover brought him to the US, the Red Scare sent him back to Europe, and he ended up as an official composer of communist East Germany.  Henze belonged to the same group of hard-left acolytes, and his politics affected much of what he wrote during his life. 

The young Henze grew up under the Nazis, with his father indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda.  Like many German kids of his age, Henze enrolled in the Hitler Youth group.  Hans was sent to a music school in 1942, but eventually both he and his father ended up in the army: the father volunteered, Hans was conscripted.  His father was killed on the Eastern Front.  Hans served as a radio operator, was captured by the British, and placed in a camp for a year until the end of the war.  After the war, Henze, by then a budding composer, attended the Darmstadt school and festival, the major center for new music in Europe, and became involved with post-classicism (in the Hindemith style) first, and then with the twelve-tone technique and serialism. 

For the next several years, Henze composed for the stage, creating several operas and ballets; he also served as ballet conductor in Wiesbaden.  In 1953, Henze, who was gay, decided to move to Italy, partly because of the perceived (or real) homophobic atmosphere in Germany, partly because of the country's more conservative culture in general.  In Italy, he continued writing for voice, operas and songs, and some instrumental music as well.  He also became much more active politically, joining the Italian Communist Party.  In Italy, he met Ingeborg Bachmann, an Austrian poet and radical philosopher.  She wrote librettos to several of Henze’s operas, including Der Prinz von Homburg (The Prince of Homburg), probably Henze’s most popular opera; he also set her poems to music.  In 1957, he created a piece for soprano and orchestra based on Bachmann’s poem, called Nachtstücke und Arien.  Here is Nachtstücke I, the first movement of the piece. 

In 1967, he wrote the oratorio Das Floß der Medusa (The Raft of the Medusa), and dedicated it as a requiem to the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.  The premier, in Hamburg in December of 1968, turned into a political scandal.  Before the performance even started, radical students hung a large poster of Che and a red flag.  Then the anarchists added a black flag.  The choir refused to sing under these flags and left the stage; the police were called to remove the students, and in this chaos, the performance was canceled.  Here’s a four-minute fragment from the Floß, with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing and Henze himself conducting.  The recording was made in the same revolutionary year of 1968. 

We’ll finish the story of this fascinating composer next week. 

This Week in Classical Music: June 22, 2026.  Charpentier, performers.  Gustav Charpentier was born on June 25^th of 1860, in Dieuze, a small town in eastern France.  He is “the other Charpentier”: a much more famous Marc-Antoine Charpentier was a leading French Baroque composer and lived two centuries earlier (he was born in 1643).  Gustav Charpentier was one of the composers known for just one work (Dukas, with his The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Leoncavallo/Pagliacci, Mascagni/Cavarellia Rusticana, and several other composers belong to the same category).  His only work that’s still being performed is the opera Louise, and even that rarely: it is popular for one aria, Depuis le jour (Since the day…), often sung in concerts.  Here’s Anna Netrebko’s rendition.  

Benedetto Marcello was probably born on June 24^th of 1686, though other sources have July 24^th as his birth date, and others still believe it was either July 31^st or August 1^st of that year.  Benedetto came from a noble Venetian family: one of his ancestors was a Venetian Doge.  His elder brother, Alessandro, also a composer, belonged to the group mentioned above: he is famous for one piece, his Oboe Concerto, written in 1715 and for a while attributed to Benedetto.  The concerto was so popular that it was soon transcribed for harpsichord by Johann Sebastian Bach.  Benedetto had an active administrative career in Venice, so composing was mostly a hobby for him.  His life was full of unusual turns (we’ve written about Benedetto here and both brothers here).  Marcello’s best-known opus is Estro poetico-armonico, a setting of the 50 Psalms (Salmi in Italian), which was published in eight volumes in Venice in 1724-27.  What is interesting about this collection is that for some psalms, Marcello used the melodies he heard in the synagogues of Venice, in the Ghetto.  Out of 50 salmi, 11 were based on Jewish melodies, some from the Ashkenazi tradition and some Sephardic.  Here is one of them, called Ma'oz Tzur (Strong Rock in Hebrew).  It’s performed by the Jerusalem-based Ensemble Nuria, which specializes in early Jewish-Italian music. 

Two conductors were also born this week: James Levine, on June 23^rd of 1943, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Claudio Abbado, on June 26^th of 1933, in Milan.  Levine was a tremendously talented musician, conductor first and foremost but also a wonderful piano accompanist.  He was only 21 when he started at the Cleveland Orchestra, first as an apprentice to George Szell and then as the assistant conductor.  At 28, he conducted the Chicago Symphony, and that evolved into a long-term association.  That same year, 1971, he first conducted the Metropolitan Opera.  Two years later, he became the principal conductor, and in 1976, the Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera, the title he held till 2016, for 40 years.  During that time, he built the company’s orchestra into one of the finest ensembles in the world and delivered some of the most interesting productions in modern opera.  From 2005 to 2017, Levine was the Music Director of the Boston Symphony; he also conducted major orchestras in the US and Europe.  In 2017, allegations surfaced that he had been molesting his young male students for years.  All major musical institutions broke ties with Levine; the Met Opera even tried to erase his recordings from its public musical library, but reversed course when it became clear that without them, the library looked rather empty.  Levine died, disgraced, in March of 2021. 

As for Abbado, he’s probably our favorite conductor of the last half century, and we have several of his recordings in the library. 

This Week in Classical Music: June 15, 2026.  Stravinsky, Morton.  Igor Stravinsky, one of the most important composers of the 20^th century, was born on June 17^th, 1882, in Oranienbaum, a town not far from then-Russia’s capital, St. Petersburg.  We love Stravinsky and have written about him on many occasions.  Like Picasso, Stravinsky went through several creative periods: his early ballets, Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, were highly original and, in the case of The Rite, revolutionary, all the while being influenced by Rimsky-Korsakov.  Sttravinsky then became involved with Russian folk music and went through a “Russian period” (L'Histoire du soldat is probably the best-known “Russian” piece, though there are Russian themes in The Rite as well).  The Neoclassical period followed; by then, Stravinsky, who had lived in Switzerland since 1914, had permanently moved to France.  Neoclassical was his longest phase; it started in 1920 and lasted for about 30 years.  Among the significant pieces written during this period were the ballet Apollon musagète, the oratorio Oedipus rex (both from 1927), Symphony of Psalms (1930), and another ballet, Orpheus (1947).  What followed was probably Stravinsky’s most contentious Twelve-Tone period; it lasted from about 1950 to 1968.  The twelve-tone technique and serialism didn’t come to him naturally: Stravinsky was introduced to it by his young friend the conductor Robert Craft.  After some experiments with smaller forms, he wrote Agon (1953-57), a ballet choreographed by George Balanchine.  Here it is, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of the late Michael Tilson Thomas.  We think there’s more of Stravinsky’s whimsical genius in this music than of the sometimes-constricting twelve-tone paradigm.

We find the peregrinations undertaken by many Renaissance composers fascinating.  Wars, brigands, famine, lack of roads and transportation notwithstanding, they moved from one country to another.  In the middle of the 15^th century, Josquin des Prés traveled from Condé in the County of Hainault (now on the border between France and Belgium) to Paris, then Rome, Milan, back to Rome, Vienna, back to Milan and then Rome, all in a matter of six years.  He would later visit Troyes in northern France and stay in Ferrara at the court of Este.  Half a century earlier, the English composer John Dunstaple served at the court of John of Lancaster, who commanded British forces during the Hundred Years' War, and moved to France with him.  Then, still during the war, he traveled all over northern France, incidentally buying properties here and there.  We’ve never written about Robert Morton, another early Renaissance English composer.   Morton, born around 1430, made it all the way to the Burgundian court of Philip the Good.  Burgundian dukes didn’t have a permanent capital (their main cities were Dijon, Brussels, and Lille) and traveled with their entourage, including musicians, throughout their possessions in northern Europe.  Philip’s successor, Charles the Bold, fought many wars and brought his musicians with him.  Morton was known to perform in Cambrai (close to where Josquin spent his youth) and lived in ’s-Hertogenbosch, in North Brabant, where Hieronymus Bosch was born.

Even though Morton was broadly lauded during his lifetime, little of his music survives.  Here’s a pretty rondeau, a type of chanson, called Le Souvenir De Vous Me Tue, performed by the ensemble Gothic Voices.