Composer, pianist, and conductor Michael Shapiro joins us to talk about the music on his latest disc, including his John Milton-inspired piano concerto entitled Archangel. In this action-packed work, Shapiro lays out the epic Biblical battle between good and evil as a metaphor for the challenges we all face in our daily lives (which includes the current coronavirus pandemic – something Michael recently fell victim to himself). Also on the disc: orchestral excerpts from an opera based on Federico Garcia Lorca, and a full-throttle realization for orchestra of the famous organ Toccata by French composer Charles-Marie Widor. LISTEN TO THE CONVERSATION

By Michael Shapiro My Second Symphony is a work of absolute music. It has no subtext; it tells no "story"; it just is. I had always wished to write a four-movement symphony, containing a serious first movement, a scherzo, a lyrical slow movement, and a set of variations concluding in transcendence.' Working in 2010 with Marin Alsop and the virtuosic Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music (for the California premiere of my Roller Coaster) provided inspiration to open my symphonic veins further, write a large work for large orchestra, and out came this purely instrumental symphony (my first, Symphony Pomes Penyeach, is a song cycle). But why a SYMPHONY? It could have been a tone poem, an essay, an orchestral prelude, overture, suite, you name it. Perhaps because for me a symphony is like writing a string quartet - a personal statement, something I just had to write. Different from a chamber work, a symphony is grand and creates not a locale, but a long form, indeed a world. It must be; it is forced to state and often demand. Composers before me have waited to write a symphony until they had that large utterance ready to be said, the epic in sound. I felt the same compulsion and out of a large blank page it came. Why is it so that composers in the middle of the great utterance can suddenly turn small, then build to a sound out of the chaos that reaches toward the heavens? The power of the symphony is unique in its mutability. I know of no other form where we are challenged to go beyond ourselves. The symphony is our chance to present large sentiments while avoid being close. I like the remoteness while at the same time immediacy of the symphony. There is a decided compunction to skip being trivial. Here is one's opportunity to draw everyone in communally. In the huge is found the most personal. A symphony can incorporate singers and choral forces, but a purely orchestral symphony like my Second Symphony is surely something else. One must convince listeners without words to receive and be moved by the basic elements of music making portrayed in massed sound. The Second Symphony is scored for full orchestra including the usual complement of winds, brass, percussion, and strings, but adding alto flute and English horn for their special pungency. Its premiere reading with The Chappaqua Orchestra in the United States was immediately followed by this recording in July, 2015 with Sir Simon Rattle's old ensemble, the miraculous City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at CBSO Centre in Birmingham, UK. The recording sessions with these great musicians confirmed the sounds, textures, timbres, rhythms, and, yes, emotions I intended to impart when I wrote the work. It is preserved now for listeners to hear, and, I trust, be moved by a symphony in four movements for orchestra, plain and simple, colorful and complex, a work that is absolutely what it is. To listen to my Second Symphony performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Michael Shapiro, conductor, please listen to the recording on Spotify.

New York-based composer, conductor and author Michael Shapiro recently recovered from COVID-19. While in hospital in New York he had help from the Sisters of Mercy in Dublin, Ireland, thanks to a local nun. "She got on the phone with the priests and the nuns in Dublin… and they prayed Mass for me. Can you imagine, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn?" Shapiro said this is representative of a connection, spiritually, between all of us. "Blessings to those lovely people. I will never forget it."It confirms where I believe all of us in beloved United States and and international countries must go. It is not heady stuff. This is just everyday stuff. Kindness and mercy," Shapiro said. "I do believe it can make our theater our music and our painting and sculpture, you name it, and just ordinary life richer and better." Shapiro has a new album out, titled Archangel. It is performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, with Steven Beck on piano. LISTEN TO THE Rio Grande Guardian INTERVIEW

On ‘Archangel', Michael Shapiro breathes new life into the famous Toccata from the Fifth Organ Symphony by Victorian French composer Charles-Marie Widor with this arrangement for full orchestra named Widorama! played by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by the composer. Shapiro's arrangement of the famous Toccata, frequently used by organists for weddings and church services, brings the work into the concert hall in highly dramatic fashion. The album also includes; Concerto for Piano and Orchestra' , ‘Perlimplinito, Opera Sweet, A Lace Paper Valentine for Orchestra' , and ‘Roller Coaster for Orchestra.' Shapiro sat down with Spokane Public Radio's James Tevenan to discuss the recording and his superb career. Listen to the attached file

Michael Shapiro's works have been performed throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe-with broadcasts of premieres on National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Israel Broadcasting Authority, Sender Freies Berlin, WQXR, and WCBS-TV. His music, which spans across all media, has been characterized in a New York Times review as "possessing a rare melodic gift." His oeuvre includes more than 100 works for solo voice, piano, chamber ensembles, chorus, orchestra, as well as for opera, film, and television, with recordings on Naxos and Paumanok Records. Michael Shapiro has collaborated with such artists as Teresa Stratas, Jose Ferrer, Janos Starker, Sir Malcolm Arnold, Marin Alsop, Sergiu Comissiona, Jerry Junkin, Paul Shaffer, Eugene Drucker, Kim Cattrall, Tim Fain, Gottfried Wagner, Alexis Cole, Edward Arron, Jerome Rose, Mariko Anraku, Elliott Forrest, Steven Beck, Ariadne Greif, John Fullam, Captain Kenneth Collins, Jose Ramos Santana, Clamma Dale, Anita Darian, Florence Levitt, Kikuei Ikeda, Ayako Yoshida, Harris Poor, John Edward Niles, David Leibowitz, Robert Tomaro, Anthony LaGruth, Kathryn Amyotte, James Allen Anderson, Matthew Thomas Troy, Sarah McKoin, Albert Nguyen, Kevin Suetterlin, David Kehler, Jeffery Meyer, Glen Hemberger, Diva Goodfriend-Koven, and Emily Wong, and organizations such as the BBC National Symphony of Wales, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Houston Symphony Orchestra, Virginia Symphony Orchestra, Charleston Symphony Orchestra, United States Navy Band, West Point Band, Royal Canadian Air Force Band, Dallas Winds, Dragefjetts Musikkorps, St. Petersburg (Russia) Chamber Philharmonic, Springfield Symphony Orchestra, Traverse Symphony Orchestra, New York Repertory Orchestra, Beloit Janesville Symphony, Garden State Philharmonic, Piedmont Wind Symphony, Opera Theatre of Northern Virginia, Westchester Concert Singers, International Opera Center at the Z?rich Opera, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Israel Broadcasting Authority, Sender Freies Berlin, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio (NPR), WCBS-TV, WQXR Radio, Milken Archive of Jewish Music, American Jewish Committee, Hawthorne String Quartet, Locrian Chamber Ensemble, Amernet String Quartet, Artemis, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Festspillene i Bergen (Bergen International Festival), and Dateline NBC, and universities in New York, Texas, Minnesota, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Arizona, Illinois, Louisiana, Ohio, Delaware, Florida, Nebraska, Georgia, and Tennessee. Michael Shapiro is featured on SiriusXM - Living American TONIGHT!!, Tuesday April 21, 2020. LISTEN

I am not sure why I picked up "Paradise Lost" by John Milton again. I remembered trying to read the book as part of the Core Curriculum for Columbia College freshmen in 1969 and not understanding very much about it, the language incomprehensible to my immature mind. But I am quite clearly obsessed with the conflict between good and evil, about the never ending fight against tyranny, it is my creative raison d'etre, so something brought me back. And wonderment befell me when I did, and I was transfixed. In beauteous and alluring language, Milton somehow creates that moment before time when Satan was cast out of Heaven to rise back up with his demons against the forces of good, only after a cosmic war to be thrown down into Hell by the Archangel Michael (no relation) and his righteous Army of Angels. And ever since, we have been trying to put the pieces back together. And somehow the creative urge told me to create a piano concerto that would not only thematically recreate that epic battle, but also have a second initially more tranquil and perhaps sublime movement, Adam and Eve in Eden, before the Serpent's arrival, and their casting out into the world we all live, the Archangel's fiery sword sealing the door to Paradise. Archangel Concerto for Piano and Orchestra is my most programmatic work. It is hopefully obvious listening to it, I think, to know what is going on. Satan, of course, is a leading man, albeit supremely evil and self-confident. When the Archangel Michael appears, he is lyrical and fine, his goodness shining. Their battle appears to be final and epic but there is a question at the end whether evil will return. It always does, and as we find in the second movement, that is because Man lets it. In Eden there is first a different sense, at least when I depict what seems to be eternal life and uninterrupted beauty and love (before the arrival of Original Sin) - the projection of sublimity in music before the onslaught of unmitigated Evil. With the introduction of the contrabassoon portraying the Serpent (Satan), there is no turning back, and we are all Adam and Eve in this world, fighting back every day against our worst tendencies, against oppression and tyranny and hatred and xenophobia. Surely fighting back against the subjugation of each other is reason enough for us to hope for the return of the Archangel, but we must be entitled to welcome overriding good, and we are nowhere close to that happening. Thus, the relevance of Milton's vision, and I hope my Archangel.
by Michael Shapiro.        CLICK HERE FOR Medium ARTICLE CLICK HERE To listen to my Archangel Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (first premiered by David Leibowitz conducting the New York Repertory Orchestra, Jose Ramos Santana, piano), please listen to the recording by Steven Beck, pianist, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.   

by Michael Shapiro In 1911, my conducting teacher and beloved friend Carl Bamberger, then nine years old, returned home from a day at his Viennese grade school to find his mother sitting at the kitchen table staring into space, a newspaper spread out before her. The headline stabbed young Carl straight into his heart: "Mahler is dead!" To music loving Viennese one hundred nine years ago, the conductor Gustav Mahler was a god. Most music lovers knew that he composed as well, but Mahler was then more famous as the music director of major opera houses, such as the Court Opera in Vienna. A few years before his death he had left Austria (seen off at the station by Gustav Klimt and Alban Berg among many others) for hopefully more lucrative work at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. Mahler's sojourn in the states soon ran into whirlwind opposition by Arturo Toscanini at the Met and the ridiculously short-sighted prejudices of the patrons and lawyers at the orchestra. Mahler fled from New York City with a bacterial infection that would end his life on that day in 1911 when young Carl entered the kitchen to find his mother staring into space. Carl's best friend Joseph Braunstein (later a well-loved musicologist and the program annotator of Musica Aeterna concerts in New York) was ten years older and had remarkable memories of Gustav Mahler during those Viennese years. Braunstein related that he was a student of Arnold Schoenberg, the influential teacher and composer, at the conservatory in Vienna. Braunstein possessed a bold sense of humor and recalled Schoenberg throwing him out of class on more than one occasion. Braunstein remembered seeing Mahler walking alone in the Prater in Vienna, deep in thought. Braunstein, always eager, thought of going up to Mahler and introducing himself, but felt the need to check himself and did not speak, but watched the solitary composer walk by. Braunstein later played in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under the illustrious direction of Richard Strauss and Arthur Nikisch, but Braunstein deeply regretted never having played under Mahler. One wonderful story remembered by Braunstein was of seeing Mahler at the performance of one of Schoenberg's premieres. While the Schoenberg piece was being played, several in the audience began to make derisive comments. One audience member was so loud and negative, the music might have been shouted down unless someone acted quickly to prevent a fiasco. Right in front of Braunstein, Mahler stood up and told the objectionable audience member to shut up, sit down, and be quiet. Mahler was immediately dumped upon by the rude audience member that at the premiere of the composer's Fifth Symphony worse obscenities had been shouted, and now Mahler should shut up and sit down! One cannot imagine such a reaction occurring today when no one seems to care much about anything. Yet during this time of pestilence, I have initially had great difficulty in composing or even listening to music. It does not help that I am stressed to the brink in worrying about my loved family and friends. Gustav Mahler was no stranger to these feelings. His music is full of expressions of worry, life and death concerns, the German word angst nowhere more apt. Just listen to the beginning of the Third Symphony for its representation of the most significant and basic issues we face. Other works such The Song of the Earth, I am Lost to the Earth, Primal Light, Songs on the Death (I cannot finish the title), place Mahler straight up against the worst we may face or are indeed facing. Carl's mother was not alone in her shock and hurt in learning about Mahler's death. The Viennese culture of the period was ravenous in its appreciation of Mahler and his contemporaries. Yet, Mahler had a special place in their hearts as he was Jewish, his conversion to Catholicism never hiding his Old Testament prophesies and cares. And for those that listened to his music, there was something that stuck and was personal. Mahler's combination of Yiddishkeit, Middle European rootlessness, cosmopolitan virtuosity, and simultaneous passion for old and new galvanized. The Bamberger family in Vienna was no stranger in its love of Kultur. Carl's later wife Lotte Hammerschlag (a string player and the first principal viola of the Palestine Orchestra) was the daughter of Alma Schindler Mahler's personal gynecologist, Dr. Albert Hammerschlag. Dr. Hammerschlag was a neighbor and close friend of Sigmund Freud, etc. etc. When the Hammerschlags visited the Freuds for dinner, little Lotte was dispatched to the nursery only to be psychoanalyzed by Freud's daughter Anna (who later became a well-recognized child psychologist). Lotte remembered her encounters on Anna's couch with disgust. The bottom line was that they all knew each other. Mahler's music ponders every moment, asks questions which he often does not and cannot answer. But asks questions that were not foreign to his contemporaries and remain valid now. Macabre dances, marches by vulgar bands, lead into ecstasy or into depths from which there is no escape. (And there was no escape for Carl's mother. After the Anschluss of 1938, she vanished into the miasma of the Holocaust, murdered in Theresienstadt.) Despite the death of Gustav Mahler from a bacterial infection (that a few decades later might have been defeated by antibiotics) and the destruction of Viennese culture by religious hatred that gave us this music, and so much more, Mahler's lessons still ring true. His titanic symphonies are somehow directly personal, the largest means chosen for their most intimate effect. I understand and feel deeply his intent in every bar. This is not music one can easily render over time. Musicians must shape every bar, every phrase, every note to give it context. It cannot just happen. It has to LIVE. I will never forget Carl Bamberger and Joseph Braunstein and certainly, Carl's dear mother. They link us to Gustav Mahler, whose love and caring will forever carry us through trying times. One lesson is to care as much as they did. Listening to this music, I cannot avoid doing just that. I look into Gustav Mahler's face and find peace. SEE THE Medium PAGE

Born in Brooklyn in 1951, Michael Shapiro has been active as a composer almost since then. On ARCHANGEL, Shapiro's Archangel Concerto for Piano and Orchestra' features pianist Steven Beck (New York Philharmonic, Brooklyn Knights). The Concerto is probably the most programmatic piece of music Michael Shapiro has ever written.  Archangel is in two books or movements. Book One depicts the war between the forces of good and evil set forth in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Book Two portrays Adam and Eve (and the Serpent) in Eden and their being cast out into the world we all live.  Archangel is therefore about the most basic and terrifying truth, the fight between good and evil raging to this day. KDFC: San Francisco's freebie this week is a movement from his Archangel Piano Concerto with soloist Steven Beck. 

Born in Brooklyn in 1951, Michael Shapiro has been active as a composer almost since then. On ARCHANGEL, Shapiro's Archangel Concerto for Piano and Orchestra' features pianist Steven Beck (New York Philharmonic, Brooklyn Knights). The Concerto is probably the most programmatic piece of music Michael Shapiro has ever written.  Archangel is in two books or movements. Book One depicts the war between the forces of good and evil set forth in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Book Two portrays Adam and Eve (and the Serpent) in Eden and their being cast out into the world we all live.  Archangel is therefore about the most basic and terrifying truth, the fight between good and evil raging to this day. KUSC: Los Angeles' freebie this week is a movement from his Archangel Piano Concerto with soloist Steven Beck. 

TWELVE TONES AND OPPRESSION by Michael Shapiro I just read about composer and pianist Charles Wuorinen's passing. I was an undergrad at Columbia from 1969–1973 when Wuorinen taught undergrads. I saw him in the hallways at Dodge in those days. Wuorinen never smiled and was always taciturn. He made it clear he knew better. I stayed away and spent happier times with Joel Newman, Denis Stevens, and Paul Henry Lang learning about Josquin, Monteverdi, and Haydn. Wuorinen ran then an ensemble with Harvey Sollberger which Elliott Carter and his wife financially supported. Harvey was a delightful man with an easy smile and talent for the flute but unfortunately with little talent for teaching in his composition class. The contrast with the rigorous Boulanger style learning I had had from Elie Siegmeister or my later studies with Vincent Persichetti was striking and revealing. I remember Harvey with happiness however as he was kind but I was perplexed how he worked with Wuorinen who seemed angry all the time. For I found the academic imposition of 12-tone note spinning in those days (from Wuorinen and others) revolting especially when we were fighting against governmental suppression (similar to today). I found (and still find) such pieces deadening and gray with no life in them. Certainly no melodic line I could find solace in. No harmony or rhythm I cared to follow or could even hear. No happiness. Where was it going except into darkness? Consumed with only a rage and black sorrow with which I never empathized. Rage and sorrow are fine but not as a constant, perpetual and demanded diet. Nothing I could enjoy. And please don't tell me what to like and care for. I am not talking about the First World War period of Arnold, Anton, and Alban which reflected its time and was organically felt. The cerebral nature of the predominantly college style when I attended Columbia felt just plain wrong to me then, a denial of the self, and of creative freedom. I found the tenor when I was at Columbia to be arrogant and despotic however and anti-learning. I just didn't get it, still don't, and still seek being what the jazz musicians call "sent" when I listen to music. After college I heard Boulez conduct one of Wuorinen's pieces at a Perspective Encounter concert downtown. in which my friend the bass Harris Poor sang. The piece was active but ultimately dead on arrival. It seemed a culmination of everything I found impossible to listen to. I just didn't care for it and was bored by its needless complexities. Today I remain someone who is not solely interested in style or how one puts notes together. I respond to expression, love, and caring. Use whatever style or way you choose. But have taste, technique, and desire. Know from whence you came (study all the literature) and where you are going. Being told what is right, evolutionary sound, is just plain wrong, Orwellian style mass direction is lifeless, and not where I care to or will ever go. Especially now.