DC Composer Greg Sandow

You can hear this interview  followed by works from his album Three Quartets on WETA Virtuoso on these following times:

11/2/2026 7:00AM
11/3/2026 2:59PM
11/4/2026 9:00AM 
11/5/2026 5:00PM
11/6/2026 11:00AM
11/7/2026 1:00PM
11/8/2026 7:00PM

Greg Sandow has degrees from Harvard and Yale and has taught at Juilliard, Eastman and Peabody. He began his musical life as a singer and focused on composition in college, but he spent most of his career as a writer. He was the classical music critic for the Village Voice and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and he's also written about pop music and scientific phenomena. This vibrant 83-year-old Washington, D.C. resident has turned his focus back to composition, and I recently spoke to him about a new album of his string quartets performed by the Terra String Quartet. While the three works were conceived separately, Mr. Sandow was pleased to discover how well they work as an album.

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The matching of performers to composer was serendipitous; the quartet’s violinists Harriet Langley and Amelia Dietrich were both students in Mr. Sandow’s courses at Juilliard. And while he insists he’s no longer in the business of pontificating about The State of Classical Music, everything about this recording reflects his values and aesthetics that feels like a statement and not just a product.

The album opens with Quartet for Anne, (2001) which he wrote as a birthday present for his then-new wife Anne Midgette (former music critic for the Washington Post, who, like her husband, is making a career turn from critic to creator and is currently working on a novel), a work full of beauty accessible to all as well as references only she would get. The Remembered Song (2018) is a metaphysical meditation on the music one dimly remembers from a previous existence. Mahler Variations (2004), by far the longest work, consists of 22 variations on the final movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony. Many of the variations are dedicated to specific artists, mostly composers, but also a couple of film directors, and the longest variation of all is titled Proust, based on the famous opening passage of Swann’s Way, which you can hear Mr. Sandow reading in the illuminating interview you can hear above.