This Wednesday at 12 noon we will present a special program commemorating the 78th anniversary of the Hartford Circus Fire tragedy. This 90-minute documentary includes an interview with Don Massey, who co-wrote the book 'A Matter of Degree the Hartford Circus Fire and the Mystery of Little Miss 1565', as well as survivors talking about their memories of that day.

AIR DATE: Wednesday July 6, 2022 - 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM (date of 78th anniversary of the fire,.

at 91.3 on the FM dial. 

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Monday: Noon–1 p.m. Alternative Radio

8 p.m.–9 p.m. Radio  Radio Ecoshock

Tuesday: Noon–12:30 p.m.  51 Percent

12:30 p.m.–1 p.m. Counterspin

Wednesday: Noon–12:30 p.m. Perspective

8 p.m.–8:30 p.m. Building Bridges

8:30 p.m.–9 p.m. New World Notes

Thursday: Noon–1 p.m. Project Censored

7:30 p.m.–8 p.m. Making Contact

8:00 p.m.–8:30 p.m. This Way Out

Friday: Noon–12:30 p.m. Nutmeg Chatter

12:30 p.m.–1 p.m. TUC Radio

Sunday: 4:30 p.m.–5 p.m. Got Science

If you have an idea for a radio program and are available to volunteer late at night, please let us know.

If you would like more information please contact us at wwuh@hartford.edu

Here is a link to CT Blues Society with events and venues.

The series consists of six consecutive Monday evenings of live jazz in downtown Hartford’s Bushnell Park, featuring locally and internationally recognized musicians, all in a comfortable, relaxed outdoor setting. If you are unable to attend, all concerts will be broadcast live on WWUH 91.3 FM or online at wwuh.org In the event of rain, concerts will be live streamed on the Hartford Jazz Society's Facebook page.

Tune in on the radio (91.3 FM) or streaming online at wwuh.org.

Gatto: The Making of Americans, Herrmann: Whitman; Marcovici: I'll Be Seeing You

A Fourth of July Special with music by Gershwin, Ives, Bernstein, Gould, Del Tredici and More

Hasse: Enea in Caonia, Antonio e Cleopatra

Weber: Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn, Holst:The Perfect Fool

Avondano: Il Mondo della Luna

German: Tom Jones, Sullivan: Cox and Box, Trial by Jury

SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT THE OPERA

SUNDAY JULY 3RD Gatto, The Making of Americans, Hermann, Whitman, Marcovici, I'll Be Seeing You. All three compositions featured on this Sunday before our Great American Holiday have a radio connection. They are all works by American composers, all performed by American musical artists. All of them have to do with American culture and history. Anthony Gatto (b.1962) is a real multimedia talent, starting off in jazz with his studies with sax legend Ornette Coleman. Gatto went on to found The Festival Dancing in Your Head. Dance, film, theater, opera- he's done it all! He adapted Gertrude Stein's novel The Making of Americans (1934) into a lyric stagework in 2008 and subsequently adapted into a radio opera in 2019. You'll hear samplings from a recording of Stein herself reading from her novel. Seven present-day singers join her voice in acting out the novel's story. The vocalists are backed by the JACK String Quartet and the four instrumentalists of the Zeitgeist ensemble. David Pinkert conducts all the performers. The radio version of The Making of Americans was released on CD through New Focus Recordings. Gertrude Stein poses, rather archly, a question: What is a normal American?

   Bernard Herrmann (1911-75) is America's greatest composer for Hollywood. His film scores for movies like Hitchcock's 1960 thriller Psycho are now considered classics. Herrmann also composed a lot of other classical music. He wrote an opera, too: Wuthering Heights (1952), based on the Bronte novel, a recording of which went over the air on this program when my Monday Classics colleague Keith Barrett substituted for me on Sunday, September 10, 1995. Herrmann also wrote music for radio in the pre-television golden age of American radio broadcasting before 1950. People listened intently to radio dramas in those bygone days. Herrmann composed a score for Norman Corwin's radio play Whitman, originally broadcast live-on-air by the CBS network from their New York City studios in 1944. Corwin's half-hour radio play, which took its text from Walt Whitman's poem Leaves of Grass, was reconstructed with Herrmann's music in 2019 by Christopher Husted. William Sharp as the poet stars with a cast including a radio narrator and a child's voice. The world premiere recording of the Whitman radio play was issued in 2020 through the Naxos label in its "American Classics" line. Angel Gil-Ordonez leads the Post-Classical Ensemble, recreating the kind of small orchestra that major radio stations often retained during radio's golden age.

   There's a wealth of American song standards contained in the Great American Songbook. So much of this music dates back to the previous century- the 1930's and 40's. People of the generation who fought in the Second World War heard these tunes on the radio and cherished them. We'll take a very nostalgic trip down Memory Lane with singer/actress Andrea Marcovici in her cabaret show from 1991: I'll Be Seeing You: Love Songs of WWII. In her long singing career Andrea Marcovici (b.1948) has played Broadway, Carnegie Hall and the White House, and her voice has been heard on National Public Radio. She was a nominee for the Golden Globe Award for her artistry in The Front (1976). She was inducted into the Cabaret Hall of Fame in 2016. Her entire I'll Be Seeing You presentation was recorded and is available on disc.

SUNDAY JULY 10TH Hasse, Enea in Caonia, Antonio e Cleopatra Every Summer season I make sure to feature something that is pastoral, bucolic, redolent of lush green Nature and the natural world, and, of course,of romantic love in the out-of-doors: a frolic of shepherds and shepherdesses. In the late baroque period the operatic subgenre of the serenata often dealt with bucolic subjects, usually in some setting hearkening back to Greco-Roman antiquity. This Summer Sunday I have two of them to offer up for your listening enjoyment, both of them by Johann Adolf Hasse (1699-1783), like Handel of Saxon origin in Germany, who also like Handel got his start as an opera composer in Italy. Young Hasse gravitated to Naples, a center of musical education, with four music conservatories, and many performance venues, especially for opera. His two serenata compositions, Enea in Caonia ("Aeneas in Chaonia," 1727) and Antonio e Cleopatra (1728) were first staged there. "Anthony and Cleopatra" you have heard before on this program, on Sunday, June 19, 2011, as performed by an American ensemble, Ars Lyrica Houston (a Dorian CD release). Enea in Caonia was released in 2020 through the German cpo label. The world premiere recording of this serenata was made in Rome by a Roman period instrument ensemble , Enea Barock Orchestra, directed by Stefano Montanari. (Aptly named, because Enea or Aeneas is the mythical founder of the Eternal City.) Before arriving on Italian soil, so we understand, Aenas the Trojan refugee dallied in what we now call Albania and was welcomed there in the ancient kingdom of Chaonia.

SUNDAY JULY 17TH Weber, Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn, Holst, The Perfect Fool Carl Maria von Weber wrote "Peter Schmoll and His Neighbors," a comic opera in two acts, in 1801 at the tender age of fifteen and saw it staged in 1803. It's a silly romantic comedy, to be sure, and it actually falls within the genre of the German language Singspiel, rather like Mozart's "Magic Flute," which has spoken-word dialog. The spoken-word parts for Peter Schmoll have been lost. The tunes sound like folk music:simple and charming, like what Mozart wrote for the character Papageno. Weber's orchestration here is quite mature and may remind you of what Beethoven would soon write for Fidelio, which also has elements of the Singspiel, especially in its opening scene. Peter Schmoll was recorded live in performance at Vienna's historic Theater an der Wien in 2019, with Roberto Paternostro conducting the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and a cast of six vocal soloists. The Austrian Capriccio label released it on a single generously timed compact disc.

   The silliness continues with Gustav Holst's one act comic opera The Perfect Fool (1923). The Fool does not have a singing part. All he has to do is awaken from his slumbers and open his eyes to bring the action to a close. He actually saves the day for everybody else. Holst wrote his own text for The Perfect Fool. He conceived a fairy tale with a wizard and a magic potion, modeled after a similar stagework by his colleague Joseph Holbrooke. Holst's music includes sendups of opera icons Verdi and Wagner. BBC broadcast The Perfect Fool in 1967. In the studio production Charles Groves leads the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra and Northern Singers. There's a radio narrator who conducts the listener along through the broadcast. The Perfect Fool was taped as it went out over the air in monaural sound by Richard Itter, the founder of the UK label Lyrita. In 2021 Lyrita finally got around to issuing Itter's now historic home recording on a single compact disc.

SUNDAY JULY 24TH Avondano, Il Mondo della Luna Now for something of the history of opera performance in Portugal. Italian opera went international in the eighteenth century. Londoners went crazy for it in Handel's time, and it was enjoyed in Lisbon, too, especially by Portugal's greatest patron of the arts, King Joseph I. Pedro Antonio Avondano (1714-82) was the son of an Italian violinist working in Lisbon. He wrote ballets and a lot of instrumental music, and an Italian opera buffa of his has also survived. (Much of his music was destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.) Carlo Goldoni's libretto for Il Mondo della Luna was set to music by many composers of the period. Haydn set in 1777. Avondano's setting dates from 1765. "The World on the Moon" capitalizes on the 18th century fad for telescopes and astronomy. A fatuous social-climbing gentleman is duped into believing he's been transported to the kingdom of the lunar people. He meets the Emperor of the Moon. Avondano provided a melodious score in the gallant style for the rollicking theatrical action. A few cuts to his score were made for the world premiere recording of Il Mondo della Luna, made in 2017 in Lisbon's Teatro Thalia. The recitative passages were handled very freely- at times approaching what the Germans in a much later period would consider Sprechstimme. A Portugese period instrument ensemble Os Musicos do Tejo backs the singing cast. Marta Aruajo and Marcos Magalhues shared the direction of the players and vocalists. The Naxos label released the out-of-this-world comic opera on two compact discs in 2020.  

SUNDAY JULY 31ST German,Tom Jones,Sullivan, Cox and Box,Trial by Jury Edward German (1862-1936) became the acknowledged successor to Sir Arthur Sullivan in the vein of light opera. Even Sullivan himself declared German was the only musician of genius who could follow him. Sullivan died leaving his last Savoy opera The Emerald Isle (1901) unfinished. German very ably completed the score, and won high praise from the music critics of the day. German's most well known work is Merrie England (1902), also written for the Savoy Theatre. I broadcast a recording of it on Sunday, July 26, 1998 and again on Sunday, July 28, 2019. German's best work, musically and dramatically speaking, is Tom Jones (1907), based on the novel by Henry Fielding. German seems to have inherited Sullivan's gift for melody. Tom Jones has plenty of memorable tunes. Strangely, this charming English operetta had to wait until 2008 for its first musically complete recording. David Russell Hulme directed the National Festival Orchestra and Chorus, with a cast that includes seven(!) baritones. Naxos Records released it on two compact discs in 2009 in its "Operetta Classics" series. Last broadcast on Sunday, August 3, 2014, it's high time this Summer to present Tom Jones again. 

   Keep listening for the lyric theater music of the young Arthur Sullivan from before his famous collaboration with William S. Gilbert. Sullivan's first professional collaboration in comic opera was with F. C. Burnand (1836-1917), the editor of Punch, the illustrious British satirical magazine. Together they concocted what was styled a "Triumviretta" for three male vocalists in one act: Cox and Box, or The Long Lost Brothers (1866). Victorian comic opera got its start on the London stage piggybacked on one of the opere bouffe of Jacques Offenbach, who created the genre of operetta in Paris. Sullivan sketched his score on piano at its premiere, with a detailed working-out of the music at a later moment. Like Tom Jones, Cox and Box had to wait a long time for its premiere complete recording with reconstructed orchestration and linking dialog between the sung numbers. The UK label Chandos released Cox and Box in 2005, employing the edition prepared by Roger Harris from Sullivan's autograph manuscript. Richard Hickox conducts the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in Cox and Box and again in Trial by Jury (1875), which was the first G & S comic opera, also in one act and styled a"Dramatic Cantata" when paired in premiere with Offenbach's La Perichole. Both these early works of the esteemed Savoyard composer fill out a single Chandos silver disc.

http://thevirtuosi.org/

The Hartford Choralehttp://www.hartfordchorale.org/The Hartford Chorale is a volunteer not-for-profit organization that presents, on a symphonic scale, masterpieces of great choral art throughout southern New England and beyond, serving as the primary symphonic chorus for the Greater Hartford community. Through its concerts and collaborations with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and other organizations, the Hartford Chorale engages the widest possible audiences with exceptional performances of a broad range of choral literature, providing talented singers with the opportunity to study and perform at a professional level.

The 70+ year old New Britain Symphony Orchestra is a professional orchestra which presents several concerts each season in the Greater New Britain area, performing works from all periods in a wide range of musical styles. In addition to its full orchestra concerts under the direction of Music Director and Conductor, Toshiyuki Shimada, including a free concert for children, members of the orchestra perform in various free chamber music concerts during the concert season.