Welcome to BBC Music Magazine's February 2025 issue! This month, we're revelling in the seasons. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, to be precise. Whether it's the music you hear on hold to your internet provider or while navigating the supermarket aisles, the Seasons is today as familiar as any song by Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran, but it wasn't always thus.
In fact, Vivaldi’s programmatic tribute to spring, summer, autumn and winter was just one of many successful works for the composer at the time of its publication 300 years ago. And, as Nicholas Kenyon explains in this month's main feature, the work languished in relative obscurity for much of its history, only really finding its audience in the 20th century as tastes, attention spans and a certain Nigel Kennedy provided the perfect confluence of events for its triumphant return.
If the Seasons is one of the earliest examples of musical narrative, opera was telling stories for more than a century prior – but here, words were key. It’s astonishing, then, that we still so rarely acknowledge the role of the librettist. And, as Jessica Duchen explains, the relationship between composer and wordsmith has been responsible for some of the greatest triumphs – and near misses – in stage history. Charlotte Smith meets a truly collaborative composer-librettist team, while for his regular column Richard Morrison charts some of the less successful efforts of years gone by.
Elsewhere, we look at the often troubled life and times of the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Derided for his Nazi associations, Furtwängler was not all he seemed, reveals Andrew Green. And this week's travel feature finds us in Atlanta, Georgia. Though well known for its world-class orchestra, Georgia’s leafy state capital also boasts a thriving opera scene, as Michael Beek discovers.
Fauré, Debussy, Alma Mahler, Leonard Bernstein... the list of great musicians with colourful love lives is an intriguing one. Jeremy Pound sneaks a peek at the lustful tunesmiths who simply couldn’t resist sharing their love around. On perhaps a higher spiritual plane, as Bach Collegium Japan celebrates its 35th anniversary, its legendary music director speaks Masaaki Suzuki to Amanda Holloway about a lifetime devoted to the great Baroque composer.
Our Composer of the Month is the 18th-century German opera maestro Christoph Willibald Gluck. Paul Riley traces the wandering existence of a cosmopolitan composer who made it his life’s work and ambition to rip up opera’s rulebook. And for this month's Building a Library we're enjoying spending time in the company of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. Terry Williams explores the best recordings of a symphony that shows the perky sense of humour lurking within its curmudgeonly composer - and selects some best recordings of this playful symphonic gem.
Here's a look at this month's cover CD this month - two great Shostakovich concertante works, in dazzling performances from soloists István Várdai (cello) and Aleksey Semenenko (violin), with accompaniment from the BBC Philharmonic and conductors John Storgårds and Martyn Brabbins. Click here or on the image to see the track details for this month's cover CD.
