Hello Open Ears fans, pianist Emanuel Ax is dropping into the feed to introduce Classical Music Happy Hour, a new podcast he hosts that you might enjoy. The show is all about the joy in chatting about music with all sorts of people, including some of Manny’s dearest friends like pianist Yuja Wang, composer John Adams, actor David Hyde Pierce, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. So grab a drink and join Manny Ax for music, merriment and conversation.

Listen and Subscribe to Classical Music Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts.

Classical Music Happy Hour is produced by WQXR in partnership with Carnegie Hall.

Ana González is here to introduce you to her new podcast, Our Common Nature, a musical journey with cellist Yo-Yo Ma. When the world stopped in 2020, Yo-Yo Ma started thinking about how music can reconnect people to the natural world. In this limited podcast series, Yo-Yo goes around the country to places where people have deep connections to the earth. Host Ana González joins him to uncover stories of how culture binds us to nature, from Maine to Appalachia and Hawaii. The result is a seven-episode series that fuses music, personal narratives, and local histories from across the United States.

Listen to more episodes from Our Common Nature series.
Visit the website at ourcommonnaturepodcast.org.

Janna Levin is a theoretical cosmologist and professor of astronomy and physics at Barnard College in New York City, specializing in the study of black holes. A Guggenheim Fellow, she’s authored several books on the topics of space, mathematics, and the impassioned people that study them; her latest book, “Black Hole Survival Guide,” allows readers to imagine an encounter with a black hole.

In the final episode of this season of The Open Ears Project, Janna Levin uses the music of Mozart to venture into the world of perfect circles, spacetime, and the drive to reach a platonic ideal. She muses on the benefits of limitations and rules, and how they have led to some of the most revolutionary scientific discoveries and works of art, from Einstein’s theory of relativity to Mozart’s unfinished Requiem Mass.

This recording of Mozart’s Requiem was provided courtesy of the New York Philharmonic.