Whether you're a seasoned classical music enthusiast or just beginning to explore its depths, Rob Kapilow's "What Makes It Great?"® presentations are sure to captivate and enlighten you. With his infectious enthusiasm and profound knowledge, Rob delves into Beethoven's music, offering fresh insights and perspectives that will forever change the way you listen.
Rob's unique ability to make complex musical concepts accessible and engaging ensures that audiences of all levels will find his presentations both enjoyable and enlightening. Prepare to be moved, inspired, and thoroughly entertained as Rob Kapilow opens a new world of understanding and appreciation for Beethoven's masterpieces.
Co-presented with TO Live
Single tickets $55 - $60
Students FREE by request - submit request to tickets@music-toronto.com. Accompanying non-student half price.
Arts Workers $20
Program
Beethoven - Sonata for Piano and Cello in A Major, Op. 69
For years Classical music fans attended Rob Kapilow’s What Makes It Great? presented by the Toronto Symphony and came away hearing orchestral music like never before. This season Music Toronto is bringing Rob Kapilow back to reveal what makes chamber music great. Here’s an extract from an article that veteran Toronto Star music writer William Littler wrote about Rob Kapilow back in 2020.
Jan. 31, 2020
Classical music popularizer Rob Kapilow
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By William Littler Contributing Columnist
What makes it great? The question continues to fascinate and puzzle listeners, whether the music is by Beethoven, The Beatles or anyone in between.
It has also given a focus to the career of Rob Kapilow, a remarkable American musician who has attempted for upwards of 30 years to provide us with some answers.
In books, on radio and television and perhaps most potently in live encounters, he has visited some of the most beloved music of the past three centuries, showing us how it works, how it communicates and what it says.
(paragraphs promoting 2020 performances appeared here and were extracted)
In seasons past he has devised similar presentations with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and other major ensembles as well as penning music of his own. Indeed, he was the first composer given the right to set Dr. Seuss’s child-friendly words to music. Kapilow’s “Green Eggs and Ham” has been called “the most successful piece written for families this half century.”
So how did it all begin? One might say it began for Kapilow while he was a third-year undergraduate music student at Yale University, when he encountered the legendary French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger at her famous summer classes in Fontainebleau.
As he recalls, she told him “you have great talent for music but no skills. You come to me and I give you skills. ”He calls this a “Hmm!” moment, one of those special times when a thought suddenly resonates. So he dropped out of Yale and went to Paris for two years to study with “Mademoiselle.”
Other such moments followed as he continued his studies, returning to Yale and doing graduate work at the Eastman School in Rochester, acquiring academic and conducting jobs along the way. He even led the pit orchestra for the Broadway musical “Nine.”
At the same time, he came to recognize that audiences often did not understand classical music the way they “got” the music he conducted on Broadway and concluded that “if this music is going to survive, people are going to have to learn what is good about it.”
Hmm!
That thought seeded what was to become an almost unique career, combining his musical and communication skills in the service of popular musical understanding. His National Public Radio show, “Great Moments in Music,” led to the development of larger audiences in America for a closer kind of listening. His public now stretches as far as Istanbul.
Kapilow’s success with audiences derives in part from wearing his learning lightly. Listeners, he is far from alone in discovering, like to learn but they don’t like being taught, at least not in an obviously pedagogical way. He manages, with his overt enthusiasm, to teach while appearing to entertain.
“What I am telling audiences is what I would tell a class at Yale,” he insists. “It’s just that the vocabulary may be different.”
One of his books bears the title “All You Have To Do Is Listen,” a pardonable simplification but an essential beginning for a rewarding musical experience, whether the music is by Johann Sebastian Bach or Irving Berlin.
His latest book, “Listening for America,” has more to do with Berlin than Bach. But its subtitle, “Inside the Great American Songbook from Gershwin to Sondheim,” indicates the scope of its subject matter — a detailed examination of the background and structure of a representative list of classic American songs, such as George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek,” Leonard Bernstein’s “Tonight” and Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns.”
Popular music seldom benefits from this kind of detailed analysis, complete with staff notation and technical terminology, but such is Kapilow’s absorption in his subject that he draws the reader into the experience of the music at a potentially new and deeper level .
Ignorance, he persuades us, is not bliss. To understand is to be enriched.”
If you are curious about what makes Beethoven great, join Rob Kapilow and the Cheng2 Duo on Sunday November 10 at 3 pm at the George Weston Recital hall - watch and hear as the answer becomes clear.