WWUH Classical Programming
March 2025
Sunday Afternoon at the Opera… Sundays 1:00 – 4:30 pm
Evening Classics… Weekdays 4:00 to 7:00/ 8:00 pm
Drake’s Village Brass Band… Tuesdays 7:00-8:00 pm
Sunday 2d
Summer, Hamlet
Monday 3d
Host's Choice
Tuesday 4th
Dun: Double Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Orchestra with Percussion; Glass: Piano Concerto #3; Copland: Dance Symphony; Brubeck: Gates of Justice
Drake’s Village Brass Band – Aspire – “The President’s Own” at 225
Wednesday 5th
Dietrich Buxtehude – Membra Jesu Nostri, BuxWV 75: III. Ad Manus. Quid Sunt Plagae Istae; Caroline Shaw – To the Hands; Dominik Argento – A Toccata of Galuppi’s; J.S. Bach - St. Matthew Passion, Mvt. 54: O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden; Felix Mendelssohn – Cantata No. 4: O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden; J.C. Bach – La Calamita de’ Cuori, W. G27: Overture
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Piano Concerto No. 12 in A Major, K. 414 – II. Andante; Philip Paul Bliss – It Is Well with My Soul; Gustav Mahler – Symphony #2 “Resurrection”
Thursday 6th
Lefevre: Clarinet Quartet No. 6 in B-Flat Major; O. Straus: Einzugs-March, Tragant Waltz, Eine Ballnacht Waltz, Bulgaren March; Juon: Vægtervise (Fantasy on Danish Folk Songs), Op. 31; Riisager: Fools' Paradise, Op. 33 Suite II; Stevenson: Scottish Folk Music Settings Nos. 7-10.
Friday 7th
Today is a Holiday – “National Sharon Day”
Sunday 9th
Poulenc, Dialogues des Carmelites
Monday 10th
Host's Choice
Tuesday 11th
Burleigh: Southland Sketches; Parker: Organ Concerto; Bates: Piano Concerto; Lloyd: Symphony #3
Drake’s Village Brass Band Gordon Jacob Music for Wind Ensemble
Wednesday 12th
Franz Schubert: Overture in D Major, D. 590, "im italienischen Stile" (In the Italian Style); Gioachino Rossini: L'occasione fa il ladro: Aria: Che sorte, che accidente; Carl Maria von Weber: Bassoon Concerto in F Major, Op. 75, J. 127; Cipriani Potter: Symphony in B Flat Major; William Vincent Wallace: Maritana: Overture; William Vincent Wallace: Maritana: Act II, Scene 1: Song: Yes! Let me like a Soldier fall (Don Caesar); William Vincent Wallace: Maritana: Act II, Scene 2: Song: There is a flow'r that bloometh (Don Caesar); Elise Bertrand: Impressions liturgiques, Op. 2; Erich Wolfgang Korngold: 4 Pieces from Much Ado about Nothing, Op. 11; George Bizet: Petite Suite (arr. of Jeux d'enfants for orchestra); Luigi and Federico Ricci: Crispino e la comare: Io non sono piu l'Annetta; Luigi Legnani: Introduction and Variations on Sorte secondami from Rossini's Zelmira, Op. 21; Paul Hindemith: Trombone Sonata; Otto Nicolai: Il Templario (The Knight Templar): Overture; Sergei Lyapunov: Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-Flat Major, Op. 4; Amilcare Ponchielli: Scena campestre (arr. S. Frontalini); Louis Theodore Gouvy: Symphony No. 2 in F Major, Op. 12; Giuseppe Verdi: La forza del destino, Act I: Sinfonia;
Thursday 13th
Blavet: Flute Sonata No. 3; Kent: 12 Anthems: No. 11 Who is this that cometh from Edom?; Kayser: Overture in B Major; Shaw: Air, Gov. Arnold's March; Serrano y Ruiz: Narraciones de la Alhambra; Wolf: Italian Serenade in G Major, Anakreons Grab; Toselli: Serenade; Isamitt: Trozo; Vladigerov: Bulgarian Paraphrase Op. 18 No. 1, Bulgarian Suite: Song No. 2 Op. 21 No. 2.
Friday 14th
Celebrating the Sun on “Solar Appreciation Day”
Sunday 16th
Handel, Jephtha
Monday 17th
Host's Choice
Tuesday 18th
Selections from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project
Carpenter: Krazy Kat; Shapero: Serenade for String Orchestra; Tower: Piano Concerto Homage to Beethoven; Zwillich: Symphony #5
Drake’s Village Brass Band – Alison Balsom Piccolo Trumpet, Baroque Concertos
Wednesday 19th
Ginastera – Lamentations of Jeremiah; Allegri – Miserere Dietrich Buxtehude – Membra Jesu Nostri, BuxWV 75; John Sanders – The Reproaches; James Macmillan – Seven Last Words from the Cross
Vittoria – Tenebrae factae sunt; Michael Barrett – Indodana; Poulenc – Stabat Mater; Handel – Selections from Messiah
Thursday 20th
D'Astorga: Non è sol la lontananza; Dallier: Fantaisie-Caprice; Nazareth: Odeon, Brejeiro, Apanhei-te Cavaquinho; Joubert: Sinfonietta Op. 38. New additions to the WWUH Library.
Friday 21st
Bach, Mussorgsky and one for Bilansky
Sunday 23d
Hildegard of Bingen/Lisa Bielawa & the Hildegurls, Electric Ordo Virtutum
Monday 24th
Host’s choice
Tuesday 25th
Tuesday Night at the Movies – Classic Films Scores Reconstructed by the Late John W. Morgan, including music by Arnold, Korngold, Skinner/Salter/ Herrmann; Marius Constant Twilight Zone, 24 Preludes for Orchestra;
Drake’s Village Brass Ban Constant: Chorus and Interludes for Horn and Orchestra, Concerto Gili Elements for Trombone; Addison: Concerto for Trumpet
Wednesday 26th
Host's Choice
Thursday 27th
Eberlin: Toccata and Fugue No. 1 in d minor; Bach: Toccata and Fugue in d minor BWV 565; J.M.C. dall'Abaco: Cello Sonata in E Flat Major ABV 37; Stevens: Ye spotted snakes; Elvey: Come ye thankful people, come; d'Indy: Symphonie sur un chant montagnard Op. 25; Tinel: Improvisata; Lutkin: The Lord Bless You and Keep You; Grofe: Grand Canyon Suite.2.
Friday 28th
Celebrating the life of Sergei Rachmaninoff ; it’s been 2/3 of a century since George Rochberg’s Symphony No. 1 premiered
Sunday 30th
Monteverdi, The Lost Vespers
Monday 31st
Host's Choice
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SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT THE OPERA
your "lyric theater" program
with Keith Brown
Programming for March 2025
SUNDAY MARCH 2ND Summer, Hamlet Shakespeare's famous tragedy has provided a fitting subject for opera composers. For example, there's Ambroise Thomas' French language adaptation of the play from 1868. Baritone Thomas Hampson essayed the title role of the pensive Danish prince in the Thomas opera, heard most recently on this program on Sunday, November 10, 2024 (EMI Classics CD's: Almeida/London Philharmonic/Ambrosian Opera Chorus), that same recording, made in 1993, previously broadcast on Sunday, May 21, 1995. Shakespeare's complete spoken-word drama I presented on four Argo CD's on Sunday, November 20, 2016. Now along comes American composer Joseph Summer (b. 1956), with his new take on Hamlet, composed in 2006 and recorded live in performance in the 2021 Ruse State Opera production in Bulgaria. Summer preserves the lyrical integrity of Shakespeare's English language text, rendering its original five-act structure into three, each act of his opera fitting nicely onto the three Navona compact discs. (Navona Records is a New England label based in North Hampton, New Hampshire, and the composer originally comes from Worcester,Mass,) Joseph Summer's Hamlet opera with its lush orchestration may remind you listeners of the music the British composer Havergal Brian wrote in 1951-52 for his adaptation of Percy Bysshe Shelley's tragedy The Cenci. That was my featured presentation on Toccata Classics CD's for Sunday, January 12th of this year. In the Summer Hamlet the title role is sung by Omar Najmi, who has been a favorite tenor at Boston Lyric Opera. (This singer is a composer, too!) Hamlet's trusted friend Horatio is a "breeches role" taken by Katherine Pracht. Our Ophelia is a Black American soprano Brianna J. Robinson. Other roles were assigned to the Bulgarian singers of the State Opera Ruse. Joseph Summer's grand operatic treatment of Hamlet is one of the installments in his ongoing Shakespeare Concert Series. His opera The Tempest (2012) is part of that series.
SUNDAY MARCH 9TH Poulenc, Dialogues des Carmelites Ash Wednesday fell this year on March 5th, beginning the forty-day period of Lent in the traditional Christian calendar. During this period in old Catholic Europe (and in Protestant lands,too) the opera houses closed for the duration and sacred oratorio was substituted for opera. On the Lenten Sundays to come leading up to Easter Sunday I will be presenting choral music of a devotional nature or operas on Biblical subjects. On this first Sunday in Lent I offer up after a gap of fully four decades a very Catholic musico-religious drama: Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites (1957). The subject here is devotion and martyrdom. The typical romantic passions of opera play no part whatever. Poulenc adapted a play by George Bernanos about a convent of nuns who are sacrificed to the guillotine at the command of a French revolutionary tribunal. The world premiere recording of "Dialogues" immediately followed its stage premiere in 1958. It's an unstaged studio recording made in Paris in mono sound. Pierre Dervaux conducts the Orchestra and Chorus of the National Opera of Paris. Listen in particular for the voice of Regine Crespin as the new prioress Madame Lidoine. This EMI recording was issued stateside on Angel LP's which I aired on the last Sunday of Lent, March 24,1985. Hear it again today in digitally upgraded sonics as issued on two EMI CD's in 1999.
SUNDAY MARCH 16TH Handel, Jephtha This was George Frideric Handel's last full-length oratorio. True, The Triumph of Time and Truth followed in 1757, but that oratorio was pieced together from previously composed music. It was a struggle for Handel to complete the score of Jephtha in 1752 since his eyesight was rapidly declining into total blindness. The story, taken from the Old Testament Book of Judges, is a tragedy setting forth the predicament of the Hebrew military leader who must sacrifice his daughter unto the Lord. There are several fine recordings of Handel's Jephtha in the discography. There's Harry Christopher's interpretation with The Sixteen choral artists and period instrument band. I broadcast it on Sunday, March 13, 2016. Then there's Neville Marriner's interpretation with the chamber orchestra of the Academy of St. Martin in-the-Fields and Academy Chorus, augmented by the Southend Boys' Choir. British tenor Anthony Rolfe Johnson sang the role of Jephtha in that 1979 recording for Decca/London. That one went over the air on Sunday, March16, 1997. (A London Jubilee 1990 reissue on silver disc.) Never previously broadcast , however, is a 1994 Berlin Classics release on three CD"s. This recording was made in co-production with RIAS Radio Berlin. Marcus Creed directs the period instrumentalists of the Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin and the RIAS Chamber Choir. Another outstanding British tenor John Mark Ainsley takes the title role.
SUNDAY MARCH 23RD Hildegard of Bingen/The Hilgegurls, Electric Ordo Virtutum The abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) must be first female composer in the history of Western music- or at least the first one that we know about by name. She was a multitalented Benedictine nun: she was a poetess, mystic, visionary, author of medical and scientific treatises, a "woman of letters" and writer of hagiographies. She wrote both words and music for a medieval morality play in Latin language, Ordo Virtutum ("The Order of the Virtues"), for which she supplied eighty two monodic melodies, ie. plainchants. Now in the twenty first century the five voices of the Hildegurls have adapted the play for modern performance with considerable electronic sonic enhancements. Heading the members of the vocal ensemble is a contemporary American composer Lisa Bielawa (b. 1968). Regular listeners to this program will remember her for the audio part of her video opera Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser (2015), broadcast on this program on Halloween Sunday of 2021. The Hildegurls' Electric Ordo Virtutum was released to the public in 2009. More sacred vocal music from the medieval period will follow.
SUNDAY MARCH 30TH Monteverdi, The Lost Vespers Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) is regarded as the founder of the new baroque style in both secular, theatrical music and sacred music for the Church. We know him best from his L'Orfeo (1607), the world's first true opera. As Maestro di capella at St. Mark's basilica in Venice, he wrote a considerable body of choral music for the Roman Catholic liturgy. Prior that prestigious appointment he wrote vocal music for devotional purposes in the princely private chapels of Northern Italy. Both L'Orfeo and his Vespers of 1610 appeared in printed editions during his lifetime, and in modern times both masterworks have been relatively frequently performed and recorded. Recordings of the Monteverdi operas and his Latin motets I have featured from time to time. Monteverdi wrote even more sacred choral music that was collected into two volumes. The first was published near the end of his life. This collection was called Selve morale e spirituali (1641), with a posthumous collection to follow, Missa et psalmi (1650). It's entirely possible to put together a complete Vespers service from the various items in those compilations. That is precisely what conductor Matthew Robertson and the singers and instrumentalists of The Thirteen have accomplished in The Lost Vespers. This music wasn't exactly "lost," only much overlooked in Monteverdi's published output. The Lost Vespers was recorded in 2023 at the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America in Washington, DC. On this fourth Lenten Sunday hear these American Vespers in the new compact disc release from Acis Productions (2024).
keithsbrown1948@gmail.com
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