This Week at The Classical Station
by Chrissy Keuper
Saturday and Sunday, September 28 and 29, 2024
Hello, Weekend!
We’re here to be your companion for whatever you have planned.
Saturday:
Join Haydn Jones at 6pm ET for the Saturday Evening Request Program.
The playlist can be found here, and you can make requests for next week’s programs here.
Sunday:
This week, Great Sacred Music includes a performance by the English Bach Festival Baroque Orchestra and Chorus with works by Franz Josef Haydn, Gabriel Fauré, and Johann Sebastian Bach. This week’s featured work is Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. Join guest host Peggy Powell at 8am ET, following Sing for Joy.
And join us at 6pm ET for Preview! This week, Rob Kennedy speaks with choral conductor Dr. Philip Cave about Magnificat’s recording, Lassus: The Alchemist, and we’ll have more of the latest new releases in the classical music world.
On these dates in the history of classical music:
German composer, critic, lexicographer and music theorist Johann Mattheson was born September 28, 1681, in Hamburg. As a child, Mattheson studied keyboard instruments, violin, composition and singing, and was singing and playing organ in church and was in the chorus of the Hamburg opera by the age of nine. He debuted with the Hamburg opera in 1696 and performed in female roles until his voice changed, then sang tenor. From 1706, Mattheson was tutor to the son of English ambassador Sir John Wich, then he was the ambassador’s secretary. He was also a good friend of Georg Frideric Handel. Mattheson is known mainly for his writings on music theory, and his documentation on the late Baroque and early Classical period were influential to theorists and historians, especially on the performance practice, theatrical style, and harmony of the German Baroque. He wrote many compositions for voice, including operas, oratorios, and cantatas, as well as keyboard music and sonatas. Most of his work went missing after World War II, but was returned to Hamburg in the late 1990s.
And English composer Gustav Holst’s The Planets, Op. 32, premiered on September 29, 1918, in Queen’s Hall, London, during the last weeks of World War I. The Queen’s Hall Orchestra performed for an invited audience of about 250 people, conducted by Holst’s friend Adrian Boult. The work was Holst’s key to international fame, and it’s said that during rehearsals for the premiere, Queen’s Hall custodians stopped working to listen to the music.
We thank you so much for listening, and for supporting The Classical Station. Enjoy your weekend!
Friday, September 27, 2024
It’s All-Request Friday, and we’re playing your favorites and dedications all day and into the night! (And again tomorrow on the Saturday Evening Request Program.) The request programs playlists are here if you’d like to know when yours will air, and if you want to make a request for next week, you can do that here. We always love hearing what you’ve chosen!
On today’s date in classical music history:
Cyril Scott, c. 1916. (Photo by Coburn, Alvin Langdon – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
It’s the birthdate of English composer, writer, poet, painter, and occultist Cyril Meir Scott in Oxton, Cheshire, in 1879. At age 12, he studied piano at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany, and later belonged to the Frankfurt Group, a membership of composers who studied at the conservatory. Scott wrote more than 400 compositions, including concerti for piano, violin, and cello; symphonies; and operas. Scott’s experimentation in free rhythm and musical motif (especially in his piano works) were said to have influenced Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. He was also an occultist with a strong interest in the metaphysical and he wrote pamphlets and books on homeopathic health practices and the occult.
Ticket Giveaway Wednesday October 2, sponsored by Burning Coal Theatre Company:
We’ll have a ticket giveaway during Classical Café (between 11am-12pm ET) for Burning Coal Theatre Company’s production of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (October 10-27). This fictional account of the meeting between physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941 imagines their conversation as they revisit their personal and professional entanglements throughout decades of war, turmoil, and scientific advancement, and ask, “What will come of the decisions we made?” Tune in and win tickets!
Thursday, September 26, 2024
Hello, Listeners!
It’s Friday Eve, which means tomorrow is All-Request Friday.
Did you make a request? Here’s the playlist with the line-up.
Want to make a request for next week? Do that here.
It also means that tonight is this week’s episode of Thursday Night Opera House!
Claudio Abbado conducts the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic in this 1994 recording of one of Richard Wagner’s most celebrated romantic dramas, Lohengrin (1850). A noblewoman, Elsa von Brabant (Cheryl Studer), is accused of murdering her brother and calls for a champion to defend her honor. A mysterious knight named Lohengrin (Siegfried Jerusalem) arrives to assist her, but in exchange for that assistance, he forbids her asking his name or origin. Will she keep her end of the bargain?
Join Dr. Jay Pierson at 7pm ET to find out.
On this date in classical music history:
BSO conductor Charles Munch (left) and guest conductor Danny Kaye (right) backstage before the performance, April 1957. (From the Danny Kaye & Sylvia Fine Collection – Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
It’s the birthdate of French Alsatian violinist and conductor Charles Munch was born in 1891 in Strasbourg, Alsace. His wish was to be a locomotive engineer, but instead he studied violin at the Strasbourg Conservatoire, where his father Ernst was professor of organ. Munch graduated in 1912 and continued his studies in Berlin and then the Conservatoire de Paris. He was conscripted to serve as a sergeant gunner in the German Army in World War I. In 1920, Munch was appointed professor of violin at the Strasbourg Conservatoire and assistant concertmaster of the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra, then concertmaster for the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne and concertmaster of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra from 1926 to 1933. He made his conducting debut in Paris in 1932 and conducted just about every major orchestra in France through the 1930s and during the years of World War II; Munch was named director of the Société Philharmonique de Paris in 1938 and remained in France, conducting the Conservatoire Orchestra throughout the German occupation. He refused, however, to perform in Germany or to conduct contemporary German music; he also shielded orchestra members from the Gestapo and gave part of his income to the French Resistance. Munch débuted with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1946; was appointed Music Director (1949-1962); and was Director of the Berkshire Music Festival and Berkshire Music Center (Tanglewood, 1951-1962). He oversaw the BSO’s first transcontinental tour of the U.S. (1953), and he was the first conductor to tour the BSO overseas, which included a stint as the first American orchestra to perform in the Soviet Union (1956). In 1963, Munch returned to France as president of the École Normale de Musique and as president of the Guilde française des artistes solistes. He appeared regularly as a guest conductor of orchestras in Europe, the U.S., and Japan throughout the 1960s, and founded the Orchestre de Paris (France’s first orchestra to be paid full-time salaries) in 1967.
George Gershwin, c. 1937. (Photo by Carl Van Vechten – Courtesy of Library of Congress)
And it’s the birthdate of American composer and pianist George Gershwin (born Jacob Gershwine) in Brooklyn, New York, in 1898. He spent much of his childhood in the Yiddish Theater District, where he (and older brother Ira) went to see shows; he was also an occasional on-stage extra. Gershwin apparently cared little about formal music studies until the age of 10, when he heard a friend’s violin recital; he then commandeered the piano that his parents had bought for his brother Ira. He began taking lessons in piano and composition and started composing music for theatre with Ira (including the songs “Embraceable You” and “I Got Rhythm”, which became jazz standards). Gershwin’s compositions were already highly influenced by jazz, so much so that when he moved to Paris to study with pianists and composers Nadia Boulanger and Maurice Ravel, both refused to teach him out of fear that classical training would ruin his style. He composed An American in Paris (1928) while he was there, then returned to New York in the early 1930s. Regardless, Gershwin’s music spans jazz and classical spheres, and his best-known works became hits in popular music, including his song “Swanee” (1919) which became a national hit; his orchestral composition Rhapsody in Blue (1924); and the opera Porgy and Bess (written with Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward in 1935). He moved to Hollywood and composed film scores for a few years and was only 38 years old when a brain tumor caused his death in 1937.
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
Hello, Listeners!
It’s the middle of the week… have you put in your requests for All-Request Friday and the Saturday Evening Request Program? You can do that here.
On this date in the history of classical music:
Jesús Guridi, c. 1960s. (Photo by Araba Press – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
It’s the birthdate of Basque Spanish composer Jesús Guridi in Vitoria, Alava, in 1886. His mother and father were a violinist and a pianist (respectively) and his music education began with them in both instruments. Guridi had formal lessons in both Madrid and Bilbao, before enrolling in the Schola Cantorum in Paris to study organ, composition, and fugue and counterpoint. His further studies were in Brussels and Cologne, before he was appointed director of the Bilbao Choral Society in 1912. He was professor of organ and harmony at the Institute of Music of Bizkaia in 1922, then the organ national chair of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Madrid from 1944, eventually becoming director in 1956 and holding the post until his death in 1961. Guridi was highly influenced by Richard Wagner as well as Basque folklore and music and was a key player in the development of Romantic zarzuela (as opposed to Baroque zarzuela), Spanish-language operas and operettas, both comic and dramatic. His best-known works are the zarzuela El Caserío, the opera Amaya, the orchestral work Ten Basque Melodies and the Triptych of the Good Shepherd, a work for organ. He also wrote works for solo piano, film music, chamber music, choral music, and songs and music for children. The Conservatorio Jesús Guridi music academy in Vitoria-Gasteiz (capital of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country) is named for him.
Glenn Gould (right) with Leonard Bernstein (seated at the piano) during a rehearsal with the New York Philharmonic in 1961. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)
And it’s the birthdate of legendary Canadian pianist Glenn Gould in Toronto in 1932. His mother taught him piano in his first years of life (he said later that her habit of playing piano while he was in the womb influenced his musical development) and he could read music before he read words. At age three, Gould was discovered to have perfect pitch and he began composing in his early childhood. He attended the The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto at age 10, studying music theory, piano, and organ, and he passed his final Conservatory examination in piano at age 12, attaining professional standing as a pianist and qualifying for an Associate of the Toronto Conservatory of Music (ATCM) diploma one year later (1945). That same year, at age 13, Gould made his first appearance with the Toronto Symphony; his first solo concert was in 1947; in 1950, he gave his first recital on radio with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; and his international career began in 1955 with performances in Washington, D.C., New York City, then the Soviet Union. Gould toured and performed for the next few years, but gave up public performance in 1964 in favor of recording, composing, conducting, writing (many contributions to music journals on the subject of music theory), and broadcasting. He remains one of the most famous and eccentric pianists of all time, and was renowned for his interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach’s keyboard works. He also preferred the pre-Baroque composers Sweelinck, Byrd, and Gibbons; music of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, and Scriabin; and 20th-century composers Hindemith, Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss. He was also well known for his eccentricities (conductor George Szell once said, “That nut’s a genius”), which ranged from humming and singing as he played to demanding complete control over his physical environment (air temperature, piano height); he later eschewed appearing in public at all.
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Hello, All! We thank you for listening to The Classical Station and for all of your support.* We couldn’t thank you enough, so we’ll just play a lot of beautiful music for you, instead.
*(If you listen but you’re not yet a member of WCPE/The Classical Station, what’s stopping you? A donation of any amount makes you a member of our station, and that support keeps us on the air/online and helps us find the best recordings of the music that you love.)
2024 is the Year of Czech Music and in this week’s Classical Considerations, Matthew Young (WCPE Web Curator) reviews the latest recording of Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70 by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Semjon Byčkov.
© Highresaudio.com
Ticket Giveaway Tomorrow (Wednesday September 25), sponsored by Duke Arts:
We’ll have a ticket giveaway during Classical Café (between 11am-12pm ET) for a recital by pianist Schaghajegh Nosrati, Sunday September 29 at 7pm ET in Baldwin Auditorium on Duke University’s East Campus in Durham, NC. Tune in and score some tickets to what is sure to be a wonderful performance.
On this date in classical music history:
John Rutter. (Press photo – Courtesy of https://johnrutter.com/)
Happy Birthday to English composer, conductor, editor, arranger, and record producer John Rutter, born in London in 1945. As a child, Rutter loved playing the piano and singing. He attended Highgate School (John Tavener and Howard Shelley were among his fellow students) and was a chorister in the first recording (in 1963) of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem with Britten himself conducting. Rutter then attended Clare College, Cambridge, publishing his first compositions and singing in the choir. He was then appointed director of music at Clare College (1975-1979) and founded his choir, the Cambridge Singers, in 1981. Rutter is a Vice-President of the Joyful Company of Singers, President of The Bach Choir, and President of the Association of British Choral Directors (ABCD). His compositions are mostly carols, anthems, and choral works, but he has also written chamber and orchestral pieces and is still composing. His work is published by Oxford University Press and has been recorded many times but he prefers recording with his own label, Collegium Records.
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Monday, September 23, 2024
Hello, Listeners!
We are looking forward to another week of fantastic music here on The Classical Station.
Join us this evening at 8pm ET for Monday Night at the Symphony, featuring the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1840. You’ll hear the orchestra perform music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Fernidad Ries, Ernst von Dohnanyi and more, under conductors Vasily Petrenko, Uwe Grodd, and current Music Director Domingo Hindoyan. See you at the symphony!
Raymond Leppard (left) laughing with Concertmaster Hidetaro Suzuki before going on stage, c. 2003. (Photo by Kelly Wilkinson, IndyStar – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Tomorrow (Tuesday, September 24):
George Leef spotlights a Legendary Performer every Tuesday during Classical Café, and this week it’s conductor Raymond Leppard. Tune in for more classical music knowledge!
On today’s date in the history of classical music:
Portrait of Princess Maria Elisabeth of Saxe-Meiningen, c. 1875. (Artist unknown – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
It’s the birthdate of Princess Marie Elisabeth of Saxe-Meiningen, born in Potsdam in 1853. She was a notable clarinetist and composer and a student of pianist Theodor Kirchner and composer and pianist Johannes Brahms; she also attended Dr. Joseph Hoch’s Konservatorium – Musikakademie in Frankfurt and was friends with Richard Strauss, Franz Mannstädt, and Hans von Bülow. She was the only daughter of George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen and Princess Charlotte of Prussia. Her father was a devotee of the stage and the arts and the founder of the Meiningen Ensemble, then a center for dramatic art in Germany. Marie-Elisabeth wrote a number of compositions for solo piano, for piano duo, and for orchestra. She is probably best known for her Romanze in F Major for Clarinet and Piano, which was inspired by Brahms and written for clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld. She was also a prominent patron of the arts, and financed the education of musicians she found talented, especially singers.
Attention: Ticket Giveaway (Wednesday September 25)
Schaghajegh Nosrati, pianist.
This Wednesday during Classical Café (between 11am-12pm ET), we’ll be giving away a pair of tickets, sponsored by Duke Arts: Pianist Schaghajegh Nosrati will give a recital on Sunday September 29 at 7pm ET in Baldwin Auditorium on Duke University’s East Campus in Durham, North Carolina. Tune in and win some tickets to what is sure to be an amazing performance.