Klassik aktuell

Klassik aktuell works like a window into classical music’s living machinery. It is concise, cultivated, and alert. The show’s recent excerpts suggest a format that can shift from profile to interview to criticism without losing its center of gravity: music as craft, memory, history, and feeling. A segment on Ludwig Bösendorfer begins with a birth date and opens into Vienna’s musical world, where an instrument maker turns a family name into an international mark of prestige. The story is not only about pianos. It is also about a hall that disappears, a city’s musical identity, and the loneliness that follows public success. Another episode spends time with Erich Sokolik, whose accordion work is treated with the same seriousness usually reserved for great conductors or soloists. The detail matters. Register flaps, calm hands, self-built tools, trips to Italy, and up to 3,000 individual parts become evidence of a mind still testing and improving after decades of experience. The Wilfried Hiller conversation has a different rhythm. It is reflective and personal, moving through composition, teaching, Messiaen, Jörg Wittmann, astronomy, Greece, women as muses, Lilith, jazz concerts, and the long institutional memory of BR-Klassik. The show leaves room for enthusiasm. It also leaves room for judgment. In the Handel episode, Giulio Cesare is framed not as a remote baroque artifact but as a psychological drama about power, vulnerability, grief, desire, and the irrational truth of the heart. The criticism is expressive, sometimes almost theatrical, yet it stays tied to musical evidence: stopped orchestras, harps, trombones, woodwinds, strings, and the human voice. Klassik aktuell suits listeners who want classical music reported with specificity rather than reverence alone. It assumes curiosity. It rewards attention. The program’s appeal lies in how comfortably it moves between concert culture, instrument building, composer biography, opera interpretation, and the emotional charge of sound itself. It makes the classical world feel inhabited by makers, listeners, teachers, craftspeople, and flawed historical figures. That breadth gives the show its value. It is not just about what is playing. It is about what music carries with it.