Melancholy Mixtape / January 2025

Six moments of classical music that impart warmth and comfort amid winter's bitter chill.

Jan 11, 2025

Welcome to our latest Melancholy Mixtape, a series here at Shades of Blue that weaves together moments of melancholy classical music to help you cultivate calm, connection, and healing throughout the month. (If you're new around here, head over here to check out previous installments.)

A woman with pale skin and dark brown hair is swathed in silky fabric as she reclines along a gray couch in this horizontal painting. Her head rests along the backrest of the sofa to our left, so her body extends to our right. Her torso is wrapped in a voluminous, ivory-white scarf or wrap. The scarf wraps tightly around her neck, and the bottom edge, near her knees, has a wide, indigo-blue pattern of ovals and vegetal forms. Her shimmering silver gray skirt is painted loosely with baby and sky blue, olive and sage green, and white strokes, and it drapes over the cushions and down the front of the couch. Her hands are clasped so her interwoven fingers rest at her navel. She looks down and off to our right. A table to our left is edged with gold. The wall behind her, above the couch, is painted with long streaks of eggshell white and pale turquoise. The gold frame of a dark painting hanging over the couch spans the width of the composition. Near the upper right corner of the canvas, the artist included a signature and as if he had signed the painting within this painting with loose, dark letters: “John S. Sargent 1911.” — John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925). *Nonchaloir (Repose)*, 1911. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Every January, as a new year begins to unspool its days around us, I'm reminded of how much I love the contrasts winter offers. Although the season is synonymous with frigid temperatures and cavernous nights, it's also a time to savor the comforting warmth of a blanket and witness the sun's ethereal dance of reflection across snow and ice, where gentle midwinter rays take on a blinding radiance.

So for this month's Melancholy Mixtape, I've assembled six musical moments that play upon those juxtapositions, allowing us the opportunity to slow down and stoke our hearts' fires amid winter's bitter chill.

Regardless of how you consume this Melancholy Mixtape — getting to know each work one by one here on Substack, or listening to them all at once on YouTube, Spotify, or Idagio — I hope you enjoy these selections.

Johann Sebastian Bach / Cello Suite No. 1, IV. Sarabande

Yo-Yo Ma, cello

Bach transforms the slow and stately French dance known as the sarabande into an expression of improvisatory prayer — each broken chord voiced across the cello's strings evokes a tender yearning, every trill a quiver of quiet ecstasy.

(And for a visual dose of Vitamin D, be sure to also check out Ma playing this work in the Great Smoky Mountains.)

Edward Elgar / Sea Pictures, I. Sea Slumber Song

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Janet Baker, mezzo-soprano
London Symphony Orchestra
John Barbirolli, conductor
(Follow along with the English poem by Roden Noel.)

Under moonlit skies, the boundless sea beckons the world to sleep with her tranquil nocturne, sung over a bed of heaving waves:

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Sea-sound, like violins,
To slumber woos and wins,
I murmur my soft slumber-song,
Leave woes, and wails, and sins.

Ocean's shadowy might
Breathes good night,
Good night …

Claude Debussy / Children's Corner, IV. The Snow Is Dancing (La neige danse)

Isata Kanneh-Mason, piano

In his mesmerizing sonic snowglobe, Debussy traces the balletic, windswept adventure of shimmering snowflakes as they journey from sky to earth.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold / Violin Concerto, II. Romanze

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Baiba Skride, violin
Gothenburg Symphony
Santtu-Matias Rouvali, conductor

A sweet sentimentality pervades the love song at the heart of Korngold's Violin Concerto, where the soloist's glistening voice caresses the ear with a tale of longing and hope.

Ned Rorem / Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

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Susan Graham, mezzo-soprano
Malcolm Martineau, piano
(Follow along with the English poem by Robert Frost.)

Traveling through the darkest of nights, surrounded by icy lakes and downy flakes, the speaker of Robert Frost's immortal poem can't help being taken aback by the beauty of the wintry landscape. But this moment of wondrous awe must, of course, be fleeting, since ...

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The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Jean-Philippe Rameau / Les Boréades, Act IV, "Entrance of the Muses, Zephyrs, Seasons, Hours, and Arts"

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MusicAeterna
Teodor Currentzis, conductor

With spacious sonorities and a cascading waterfall of melody, it's impossible to conceive how this music is more than 350 years old — an interlude from Rameau's final opera, Les Boréades, in which a caravan of mythical creatures assemble to reflect on the power of art and the certainty of time's passing.

Want to share your experience with one of the works in this month's mixtape? I'd love to hear about it! Leave a comment below or reply to this email. (And if you enjoyed your time here today, would you ever so kindly tap that little heart below? 👇🏼)

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Sarah Harkness

Jan 11

I adore the Korngold. I read somewhere that if it sounds to you like film soundtracks, it's because every composer of film soundtracks is just trying to reproduce Korngold

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1 reply by Michael Cirigliano II

E.L. Zeitgeist

Jan 13

I’m so bewildered that I never knew about Korngold (and, gasp, Kings Row!!)… so you sent me into a deep rabbit hole there! What a pivotal influence!! I also really loved Sea Pictures… “isles in elfin light”! Ahhh and I needed that vitamin D from Yo-Yo Ma in the dappled light of the Smokys!

2 replies by Michael Cirigliano II and others

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