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WWUH Classical Programming
November 2024
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
Friday 1st
Selections from our “New Bin”
Sunday 3d
Shakespeare, Cymbaline
Monday 4th
Host's Choice
Tuesday 5th
Music for an Election Night – Anne Akiko Meyers Violin – The American Album; Leonard Slatkin St. Louis Symphony Orchestra – The American Album; Louis Lane The Cleveland Pops – Pops Concert U.S.A.
Drake’s Village Brass Band – Canadian Brass and Friends ; Red, White and Brass
Wednesday 6th
Theme: “Death in Classical Music” - Stephen Paulus – The Road Home
Tarik O’Regan – Triptych; Mantyjarvi – Modern Madrigal #3: Smoking Can Kill
Mantyjarvi – Canticum calamitatis maritimae; Michael Barrett – Indodana
Barber – Reincarnations; Casper Clausen – In Pace; Traditional – Deep River
Vaughn Williams – Three Shakespeare Songs: Full Fathom Five; Rachmaninoff – Vespers #6; Martin – Mass for Double Choir; Mozart – Maurerische Trauermusik
Hindemith – Trauermusik; Ravel – Pavane pour une Infante Defunte; John Sheppard – Media Vita; Mozart – Requiem; Traditional (arr. Parker) – Hark, I hear the Harps Eternal; Rachmaninoff – The Isle of the Dead; Chopin – Piano Sonata #2; Dvorak – Marcia funebre; Ravel – Le Tombeau de Couperin
Thursday 7th
Erkel: Festival Overture, God Bless the Hungarians with good cheer; Brull: Violin Concerto in a minor, Op. 41; Lincke: Brandbrief-Galopp, Berliner Luft; Gardiner: Shepherd Fennel's Dance; Alwyn: Elizabethan Dances.
Friday 8th
Music to celebrate “World Pianist Day”
Sunday 10th
Thomas, Hamlet
Monday 11th
Host's Choice
Tuesday 12th
Music for Jane – McCartney: Standing Stone; Holst: Morris Dance Tunes; Gershwin: Piano Concerto in F; Braunstein: Abby Road Concerto; Music from the Coronation
Drake’s Village Brass Band The Grimethorpe Band – Music from Brassed Off
Wednesday 13th
Friedrich von Flotow: La veuve Grapin: Overture; Henri Herz: Piano Concerto No. 5 in F Minor, Op. 180; Jacques Fromental Halevy: La Juive: Loin de moin amie; Cipriani Potter: Symphony No. 1 in G Minor; Giacomo Meyerbeer: Le prophete (The Prophet): Overture; Giacomo Meyerbeer: Le prophete, Act V: Ô prêtres de Baal - Ô toi qui m'abandonnes; Charles Gounod: Marche solennelle (arr. J. Thomas for harp and piano); Duo Praxedis; Salomon Jadassohn: Serenade, Op. 104; Giuseppe Verdi: Un ballo in maschera: Prelude; Giuseppe Verdi: Un ballo in maschera: Act II Scene 2: Teco io sto (Riccardo, Amelia); Percy Grainger: Mock Morris; Francesco Paolo Tosti: Tosti: Malinconia, Nos. 1 – 5; Reynaldo Hahn: Soliloque et forlane for Violin and Piano; R. Nathaniel Dett: Magnolia: V. The Place Where the Rainbow Ends; Gian Carlo Menotti: The Old Maid and the Thief: Overture; Richard Strauss: Oboe Concerto in D Major, TrV 292; Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari: Arabesken in E Minor, Op. 22; Sergei Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, Op. 44;
Thursday 14th
Zachow: Trio Sonata in F Major; L. Mozart: Trumpet Concerto in D Major, Sinfonia in G Major 'Neue Lambacher'; Spontini: La Vestale: Ballet Music; Hummel: Piano Trio No. 7 in E Flat Major Op. 96; Mendelssohn-Hensel: Piano Sonata in g minor; Copland: At the River, El Salón México, Rodeo
Friday 15th
Solo & chamber music of Alexander Tansman
Sunday 17th
Bononcini, Griselda (highlights), Graun, Montezuma (highlights)
Monday 18th
Host's Choice
Tuesday 19th
Hartman: Violin Concerto; Clyne: The Seamstress – Concerto for Violin and Orchestra; Walton: Sonata for String Orchestra; Stravinsky: AppolonMusagete; Ives: Symphony #3
Drake’s Village Brass Band North Texas Wind Symphony – Dreamcatchers
Wednesday 20th
Theme: “Multitalented Composers” - Kodaly – Budavari Te Deum; Bloch – Concerto Grosso # 1; Borodin – Symphony # 2; Eric Whitacre – Three Songs of Faith; Eric Whitacre – Five Hebrew Love Songs; Paganini – Violin Concerto # 1; Hildegard von Bingen – Selected choral works; Andrey Stolyarov – Selected choral works; PLUS an interview with Connecticut-based composer Andrey Stolyarov
Thursday 21st
Tarrega: Capricho Arabe, Recuerdos de la Alhambra; Karg-Elert: Sonata in B Flat Major Op. 121; Williamson: Sinfonietta; Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 (extracts).
Friday 22nd
Joaquin Rodrigo was 12 years old when Benjamin Britten was born on this date in 1913.
Sunday 24th
Taylor, Peter Ibbetson
Monday 25th
Host's Choice
Tuesday 26th
Harty: Irish Symphony; Carpenter: Birthday of the Infanta; Janacek: Cunning Little Vixen Suite; Hanson: The Mystic Trumpeter; Debussy: Khamma; Lloyd: Symphony #2
Drake’s Village Brass Band Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra – Nordic Wind Band Classics
Wednesday 27th
Host's Choice
Thursday 28th
Lully: Acis et Galatee: Suite; Ries: Piano Trio in c minor, Op. 143; A. Rubinstein Piano Concerto No. 4 in d minor, Op. 70; Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Op. 15; Mozart: Flute and Harp Concerto, K. 299; Mendelssohn: The Hebrides, "Fingal's Cave" Overture, Op. 26; Vitali: Chaconne in g minor; Wolf-Ferrari: Il Segreto di Susanna: Sinfonia; Vivaldi: Bassoon Concerto in E flat major RV 483; Haydn: Symphony No. 96 in D major 'Miracle'.
Friday 29th
Erich Wolfgang Korngold – movie music and more
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SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT THE OPERA
your "lyric theater" program
with Keith Brown
Programming for the month of November 2024
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 3RD Shakespeare, Cymbeline Spoken word presentations have always been part of my broad spectrum concept of lyric theater programming. I have broadcast recordings of many of William Shakespeare's plays. Often these were on early stereo Decca/Argo LP's. These studio recordings, made between 1957 and 1964, were part of Decca's series of the complete recorded works of Shakespeare, issued in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of his birth. It was an audio project of historic significance equal to Decca's recorded series of Wagner's Ring cycle of operas during the same period with Georg Solti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and a singing cast of some of the greatest operatic voices of the mid twentieth century. Decca's Shakespeare project engaged distinguished director George Rylands and the Marlowe Dramatic Society, plus other "professional players",who included some of the finest Shakespeareans that Britain possessed at that time. Some of them remain famous names even now in the twenty first century. In 2016 the entire Decca Shakespeare series- all thirty seven plays, the sonnets and narrative poems- was released on one hundred compact discs to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the Bard's death. Cymbeline (1610) comes along very late in the Bard's playwriting career. He seems to have been experimenting with the new theatrical genre of the romance or tragicomedy, the style of which was then being developed in Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster (1609). The application of the term "tragicomedy" is misleading here because although this play is similar in some respects to the truly tragic King Lear, which immediately preceded it, Cymbeline couldn't be a downright tragedy: it has a happy ending. In its final act the problematic strands of the plot are untangled: everybody gets pardoned. In his late plays Shakespeare's advanced style of dialogue has become more freely conversational, less stilted to our modern ears perhaps, but still beautifully poetical.
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 10TH Thomas, Hamlet The plays of Shakespeare have frequently been adapted into operas. Some of these adaptations have entered the permanent international standard operatic repertoire. Think of Giuseppe Verdi's Otello (1887) or his Falstaff (1893). Others were noble attempts that came and went upon the lyric stage in the course of the nineteenth century. Mignon (1866) is the only opera by Ambroise Thomas (1811-96) that is at all well known today, although the composer wrote at least twenty other operas. Thomas' most ambitious essay in French romantic grand opera is his Hamlet (1868). Performances of it abounded to the end of the nineteenth century. After the First World War, however, it disappeared. Hamlet is the perfect vehicle for a dramatic baritone. Thomas originally intended the title role for a tenor, but there was no tenor of sufficient heroic stature to be found in Paris in those days. In the later twentieth century there were a number of outstanding baritones in circulation who could do justice to Thomas' tragic hero. American baritone Thomas Hampson tackled the role of the heavy-hearted Danish prince with such convincing force that his recorded interpretation was termed a "miracle" by Fanfare magazine, Another deep-voiced operatic luminary Samuel Ramey is heard as Laerte in the recording made for EMI in 1993. Antonio de Almeida leads the London Philharmonic and Ambrosian Opera Chorus. I last presented this same EMI CD release on Sunday, May 21, 1995.
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 17TH Bononcini, Griselda (highlights), Graun, Montezuma (highlights) It was only when I broadcast Handel's Alcina last month (Sunday, October 3rd) that I realized the important role the diva soprano Joan Sutherland played in the very beginnings of the revival of baroque opera and how she furthered the historically informed performance movement in the mid twentieth century. Her husband conductor Richard Bonynge has got to be credited for mentoring her in baroque vocal practice and for editing and preparing the scores of the eighteenth century operas for her remarkable singing voice. Together they recorded a generous swath of baroque operatic repertoire that had lain dormant for more than two hundred years. The Italian opera seria was the dominant international musical artform of the eighteenth century. Long before he wrote English language oratorios the German immigrant Handel was writing Italian opere serie in London. For a while his chief rival on the operatic scene in London was an Italian composer Giovanni Bononcini (1670-1747). His Griselda (1722) is a setting of a libretto by Apostolo Zeno that many other composers of the era drew upon , among them the esteemed Alessandro Scarlotti. The Scarlotti Griselda (1721) ended the master's career in opera composition. (He had written a total of 114 such works.) The complete Scarlotti opera seria went over the air on this program on Sunday, January 18, 2004. (Harmonia Mundi CD's: Rene Jacobs/Akademie fur Alte Musik.) Bonynge and Sutherland recorded the Bononcini Griselda way back in 1966 in studio taping for Decca. Listen for an hour's worth of the Bononcini Griselda. Bonynge conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Ambrosian Singers. Sutherland sings as part of a cast of five vocal soloists.
Carl Heinrich Graun (1703-59) was another German composer of the baroque to compose Italian language opera. His Montezuma (1755) was only performed once for the court of King Frederick the Great of Prussia, who wrote its Italian libretto. A complete recording of Graun's Montezuma I broadcast on Sunday, February 12, 1995. (Capriccio CD's: Johannes Goritzki/ Deutsche Kammerakademie.) The printed score of Montezuma was published in 1904. Bonynge must have consulted it for the 1966 Decca recording. C H Graun composed some thirty lyric stageworks, most of them for the Prussian Royal Opera in Berlin. Coming at the end of the baroque, Graun was a musical progressive writing in a pre-classical style which anticipates that of Gluck. In Montezuma Sutherland is one of six singing characters.
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 24TH Taylor, Peter Ibbetson Joseph Deems Taylor (1885-1966): ever heard of him? As composer and music critic he loomed large on the American classical music scene in the first half of the twentieth century. (He made his home in Stamford, Connecticut.) It Was Deems Taylor who narrated Walt Disney's Fantasia. The Met had long been eager to produce new operas by American composers. In 1912 the Metropolitan Opera began to sponsor a competition, but the entries of various big names like Victor Herbert and Horatio Parker all fizzled out. Deems Taylor was offered a commission from the Met that resulted in The King's Henchmen (1927), with a libretto by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Building on its critical success Taylor composed Peter Ibbetson (1931), based on a novel by the Victorian British author George du Maurier. Peter Ibbetson pleased the public enormously. The box office take from revivals up to 1936 helped keep the Met in business during the hard times of the Great Depression. The opera had been rather poorly recorded from a 1934 broadcast. A CD transfer of this was available at one time through the Immortal Performances label, so Naxos Records cannot rightly claim that its 2009 compact disc release of Peter Ibbetson is a world premiere recording. That recording was made in 1999 with Gerard Schwartz conducting the Seattle Symphony and Symphony Chorus. I last presented Peter Ibbetson on Sunday, September 15, 2010. Enjoy it again as an American opera classic on this Sunday before our annual American harvest home holida
keithsbrown1948@gmail.com
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