This Week at The Classical Station
by Chrissy Keuper
Saturday and Sunday, 6-7 September 2025
Hello, Weekend! Let’s fill it with wonderful music.
This weekend:
Join Peggy Powell at 1pm ET for Saturday On Point, your weekly spotlight on classical music for dancers on the stage. This week features Igor Stravinsky’s classic ballet inspired by Slavic folktales about a magical bird:
L’Oiseau de feu (The Firebird).
At 6pm ET, Haydn Jones is playing your requests and dedications on the Saturday Evening Request Program.
Here’s the playlist
Make requests and dedications for next week’s programs here
Start your sacred Sunday morning at 7:30am ET with Sing For Joy from St. Olaf College, followed at 8am ET by James Steelmon and Great Sacred Music, featuring Anton Bruckner’s Mass in E minor.
At 6pm ET, Tom Hayakawa celebrates new and recent classical releases on Preview!, which include the Ariel Quartet and Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 4, and the Nash Ensemble with Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Violin, and Harp.
On these dates in the history of classical music:
William Kraft at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, c. 2011. (Photo by Anne Cusack, Los Angeles Times)
American timpanist, percussionist, conductor, and composer William Kraft was born September 6, 1923 in Chicago, Illinois. Kraft studied composition, percussion, and conducting on two Anton Seidl Fellowships at Columbia University and worked as a freelance musician, which included a stint as a percussionist with the Metropolitan Opera. He joined the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, then the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was eventually named principal timpanist and assistant conductor (under Zubin Mehta) and founded and directed the Philharmonic’s New Music Group. Kraft also founded the Los Angeles Percussion Ensemble (1958) and headed the composition department and held the Corwin Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara until he retired in 2002.
Jo Juda, date unknown. (Dutch National Archive)
And Dutch violinist Jo Juda was born September 7, 1909 in Amsterdam. Juda attended the Amsterdam Music Lyceum and the Hochschule für Musik, then became violinist, concert soloist, and concertmaster of the Amsterdam Bach Orchestra and other regional orchestras, including the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (where he was the orchestra’s first concertmaster). Juda also taught violin at the Maastricht Conservatory, the Hague Conservatory, and the Conservatory of Amsterdam and wrote compositions for string orchestra, solo violin, cello, flute, and choir. Sadly, he was one of only two family members to survive the Second World War, following his arrest and internment at Buchenwald concentration camp in 1940.
Friday, 5 September 2025
Happy Friday, All!
It’s time once again for your special musical requests and dedications on All-Request Friday (and again tomorrow on the Saturday Evening Request Program).
Tune in to hear what your fellow listeners and classical music lovers have chosen for you!
I want to see what’s on the playlist!
I want to make a request for next week’s shows!
On this date in the history of classical music:
Eduardo Mata, c. 1983. (Publicity Photo – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
It’s the birthdate of Mexican conductor and composer Eduardo Mata in Mexico City in 1942. Mata studied guitar and composition at Mexico’s National Conservatory of Music and then received the Koussevitzky Memorial Fellowship in 1964 which allowed him to study composition and conducting at Tanglewood. The next year, Mata was appointed head of the Music Department of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and conductor of the Guadalajara Orchestra; he was named principal conductor of the Phoenix Symphony in 1972; and he served as music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra from 1977 to 1993. He was about to take over as principal conductor of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in 1995 when he was killed in a plane crash. Among Mata’s compositions are three symphonies and a number of chamber works (including his Trio for Clarinet, Drum, and Cello, which he dedicated to Ralph Vaughan Williams) and he served as conductor on more than fifty recordings, mostly with the UNAM Symphony Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra.
Thursday, 4 September 2025
Listeners, it’s Friday Eve!
We’ll celebrate with a Henry Purcell Double Feature on Thursday Night Opera House:
First, Raymond Leppard conducts the English Chamber Orchestra and Chorus and some legendary soloists in Dido and Aeneas (1985).
Then, the Scholars Baroque Ensemble takes over for The Fairy Queen (1992).
Join Dr. Jay Pierson for the opera(s) at 7pm ET.
On this day in classical music history:
Pedro Camacho at the piano at SCAT Jazz Lounge in Ft. Worth, TX, c. 2012. (Courtesy of Pedro Camacho)
A very Happy Birthday to Portuguese composer Pedro Camacho, born in Funchal in 1979. Camacho studied piano and composition at the Conservatory-Madeira School of Arts and the National Conservatory in Lisbon, then studied film scoring at Berklee College of Music, and he is widely known as a composer of both classical music and scores for films and many, many video games.
Wednesday, 3 September 2025
Need a midweek boost? We find that wonderful music helps.
On this date in the history of classical music:
Dorothy Maynor with Serge Koussevitzky (left), date unknown. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)
It’s the birthdate of American soprano Dorothy Maynor, born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1910. Maynor attended the Westminster Choir School in New Jersey before auditioning in 1939 for Serge Koussevitzky at the Berkshire Festival, where the conductor called her voice “a miracle”. Her public debut that year at The Town Hall in New York City was declared the event of the city’s musical season and she received the Town Hall Endowment Series Award the next year. In 1949, Maynor was the first African–American to perform at a presidential inauguration for President Harry S. Truman’s inaugural gala (and she performed again at President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1953 presidential inauguration). Maynor’s voice was built for the opera, but racism prevented her performance in opera houses. Nevertheless, she toured throughout the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, and performed frequently and widely on the radio. She founded the Harlem School of the Arts in 1964 to provide music education at reduced costs to the children of Harlem; by the time Maynor retired in 1979, the school had more than a thousand students.
Tuesday, 2 September 2025
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On this date in classical music history:
Laurindo Almeida, c. 1947. (Photographer unknown – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
It’s the birthdate of Brazilian guitarist and composer Laurindo Almeida in Prainha in 1917. Almeida was largely a self-taught guitarist who moved to São Paulo as a teenager to work on the radio and to perform in nightclubs. He made his way to Europe as a guitarist in a cruise ship orchestra and became known as a classical Spanish and popular guitarist Almeida returned to Brazil a few years later and later moved to Los Angeles, where he was immediately put to work in film studio orchestras. Although much of Almeida’s career was as a jazz guitarist, he made many classical recordings and performed classical works and of his five career Grammy Awards, four were in classical categories.
Monday, 1 September 2025
Welcome to a new week AND a new month, Listeners!
Let us accompany you with some great classical music.
This evening at 7pm ET, join Vince Tillona for Drop the Needle and the warmth of vinyl recordings. This week’s show highlights Giuseppe Verdi’s Day of Wrath (Dies Irae) and the artistic impressions of Modest Mussorgsky through his Pictures at an Exhibition.
Then at 8pm ET, Monday Night at the Symphony features recordings of the Czecho-Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra with works by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Anton Rubinstein, Engelburt Humperdinck, and more, conducted by Martin Fischer-Dieskau, Oliver Dohnanyi, and featuring a special performance by Ernest Tomlinson conducting his own composition.
On Tuesday, tune in for Classical Café with George Leef for this week’s Legendary Performer:
Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire.
On this date in classical music history:
Seiji Ozawa conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, c. 1983. (Photo by Akira Kinoshita)
It’s the birthdate of Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa, born in 1935 in Mukden in what was then Japanese-occupied Manchuria (now Shenyang, China). Ozawa was a piano student as a child; after breaking two fingers in a rugby match in his teenage years, he switched his musical focus to conducting and composition and found work with the NHK Symphony Orchestra and the Japan Philharmonic while he was still in school. He became an international classical music figure (and was the first Japanese conductor recognized internationally) in 1959 when he won the International Competition of Orchestra Conductors in France and then the Koussevitzky Prize at Tanglewood Music Center in the U.S. Ozawa went on to study in Berlin with Herbert von Karajan for a couple of years before Leonard Bernstein named him assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic (and Ozawa is apparently the only conductor to have studied under both Karajan and Bernstein). He continued his conducting career with the San Francisco Symphony; the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as first music director of the Ravinia Festival; the Vienna Philharmonic; the Toronto Symphony Orchestra; and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he served as music director for 29 years, the longest tenure of any BSO music director.
Friday, 5 September 2025
Happy Friday, All!
It’s time once again for your special musical requests and dedications on All-Request Friday (and again tomorrow on the Saturday Evening Request Program).
Tune in to hear what your fellow listeners and classical music lovers have chosen for you!
I want to see what’s on the playlist!
I want to make a request for next week’s shows!
On this date in the history of classical music:
Eduardo Mata, c. 1983. (Publicity Photo – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
It’s the birthdate of Mexican conductor and composer Eduardo Mata in Mexico City in 1942. Mata studied guitar and composition at Mexico’s National Conservatory of Music and then received the Koussevitzky Memorial Fellowship in 1964 which allowed him to study composition and conducting at Tanglewood. The next year, Mata was appointed head of the Music Department of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and conductor of the Guadalajara Orchestra; he was named principal conductor of the Phoenix Symphony in 1972; and he served as music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra from 1977 to 1993. He was about to take over as principal conductor of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in 1995 when he was killed in a plane crash. Among Mata’s compositions are three symphonies and a number of chamber works (including his Trio for Clarinet, Drum, and Cello, which he dedicated to Ralph Vaughan Williams) and he served as conductor on more than fifty recordings, mostly with the UNAM Symphony Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra.