End of April GotRadio Classical Music Programming

  It's almost the end of April already!  

We hope everyone had a wonderful Passover and Easter!  This month our new channel, Classical Voices, has been the featured channel on GotRadio, thank you for helping to make it a very successful launching!  To celebrate we've highlighted a great giveaway CD all month: Haydn’s The Creation. There is still time to enter for this fantastic recording, don’t delay, you just might be one of the lucky recipients!  See my blog from April 1, for details about conductor Rene Jacobs and this performance.

Meanwhile, Spring is in full bloom and Summer is not far behind! Here’s a partial list of gems to listen for in both our Classical and Classical Voices channels as April gives way to May…  

Classical

• Symphony #3 – Gustav Mahler: the opening march, announcing the arrival of Summer, is essentially a direct quote of the main melody from the fourth movement of Brahms’ Symphony #1, but in a minor key.  Mahler’s 3rd Symphony was his paean to nature, and an homage to Brahms.  He originally gave each movement a title such as “What the flowers in the meadow tell me” and “What the animals in the forest tell me”, etc.  He ultimately decided to remove those titles and let the music speak for itself.  
  • We’ll also play the final movement from Brahms’ 1st Symphony so you can hear the relationship between these two great pieces of music.
• Brandenburg Concerti – Johann Sebastian Bach: we’re continuing to featuring Trevor Pinnock’s landmark recordings of all six of Bach’s most well-known chamber works. Pinnock invited musicians to participate in his p roject which combined HIP (historically informed performance) techniques with modern techniques to give us the best of both worlds.  They are excellent!
• Violin Sonatas – Johannes Brahms: Brahms wrote much more chamber music than orchestral, in part because they were for himself or friends to concertize with. These three beautiful works, performed for us by those two giants Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Ashkenazy, greatly affected Clara Schumann whom, after hearing and playing one, “had to cry my heart out for joy”.
• A Hero’s Life (Ein Heldenleben) and Death and Transfiguration – Richard Strauss: the hero in the first tone-poem is none other than Strauss himself!  The music illustrates our hero’s birth,  development, courting (winning his lady love - wife Pauline), the noisy battle and defeat of his enemies (music critics), his good works, and ultimately his old age and death, to tender violin strains (subtly accompanied by the main melody from his earlier Death and Transfiguration). It is all great Strauss, performed with appropriate dash and swash by Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. 
  • I’m including Death and Transfiguration, too, so when you hear it at the end of Heldenleben you can hear the reference.  Written 10 years earlier, when Strauss was just 25, it gave the world an inkling of the talent to come, and Strauss had come into his own.
• Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste – Bela Bartok: this mercurial music was Bartok’s answer to the symphony.  Since the Detroit Symphony has been in the news lately, we’re featuring their great performance, conducted by Antal Dorati.
• Sonata for Violin and Piano #5 “Spring” – Ludwig van Beethoven:  the title says it all!
• Appalachian Spring – Aaron Copland: This one is sort of a cheat, because the Spring of the title refers to a small stream, not the season… oh well!
• Trittico Botticelliano and Church Windows - Ottorino Respighi: we’re continuing to feature Trittico Botticelliano, that colorful example of Respighi’s genius for orchestration and mood.  The three movements are based on three paintings by Botticelli: Spring, The Adoration of the Magi, and The Birth of Venus.  From the opening splash of orchestral color, Spring evokes the jubilance of the group of mythological characters reveling in an abundantly fertile setting, with Cupid hovering, arrow poised! Just as the painting itself leaves the viewer wondering what will happen next in the scene, the music builds and leaves the listener similarly suspended with no resolution.
  • Church Windows also fits our theme.  They are based on the images from four stained-glass windows, and the first one is called Flight into Egypt. The others are St. Michael Archangel, The Matins of St. Clare, and St. Gregory the Great.
• Symphony #1 “Spring” – Robert Schumann: Schumann was inspired enough by a poem about Spring to make it the subject of his first attempt at a symphony.
• Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) – Igor Stravinsky: you get the idea.  Stravinsky’s revolutionary ballet illustrates a primitive clan’s Spring fertility ritual, culminating in the sacrifice of a virgin!
• William Tell Overture – Gioachino Rossini: what do a 15th-century Swiss folk hero and a Texas masked hero on a white horse have in common?  Nothing!  But they are linked forever by the wonderfully evocative and justly famous music of Rossini’s overture to his 39th and final opera William Tell.  And what do the overture and the opera have in common?  Nothing!  None of the music in the overture is actually in the opera!  Not unusual for Rossini.
• Spring from The Four Seasons – Antonio Vivaldi: a timeless work by the Italian Bach.

And a lot more, too….

Classical voices

• In honor of the recent passing of Robert Tear:
  • Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings – Benjamin Britten: we have already been playing this for a couple weeks now, so I mentioned it in my previous blog, but we’re gonna let it ride under the circumstances of Tear’s passing.
  • Beatrice & Benedict – Hector Berlioz: Berlioz was a Shakespeare nut!  Tear characterfully sings the role of Benedict in this great recording of the delightfully melodic opera, based on Much Ado about Nothing.
  • Songs Op. 59 – Edward Elgar: based on the sentimental poetry of Canadian writer Gilbert Parker, these songs reflect Parker’s frame of mind.  Elgar intended to compose a larger cycle of songs (similar to his Sea Pictures), but did not complete it for unknown reasons.
  • The Bells – Sergei Rachmaninov: An admirer recommend Rachmaninov compose music to Poe’s four-part poem, which touches on four experiences of life in terms of the sound of bells (silver - youth, gold - marriage, brass - war, and iron - mourning).   He composed them as a four-movement choral work.  Tear sings in the first movement, the silver bells of a joyous sleigh ride.
  • On Wenlock Edge – Ralph Vaughan Williams: Vaughan Williams was very impressed with Ravel’s music and decided to study with him in 1908 (which greatly surprised Ravel!).  One of the first works he composed after his three months in France was this atmospheric song cycle, based on poetry of A. E. Houseman, A Shropshire Lad.
  • Love Blows as the Wind Blows – George Butterworth: inspired by his friend Vaughan Williams’ song cycle, Butterworth composed this setting of W. E. Henley poetry in 1912.  Tragically, he died in action in 1916.
• Israel in Egypt – Georg Friedrich Handel: in keeping with the Easter/Passover seasonal spirit, we present highlights of Handel’s English oratorio relating the biblical story of Exodus.  This oratorio represents a dramatic work by Handel in his English style, quite different from that of his Italian style operas.
• Parsifal – Richard Wagner: in further keeping with the season, we present highlights of Wagner’s final opera, with its references to Good Friday.  Wagner makes generous use of the melody known as the “Dresden Amen”, and the opera ends in orchestral and choral waves of redemption.
• Four Last Songs – Richard Strauss:  these four gorgeous songs were the last music composed by the 83 year-old Strauss, who died a year later.  Their subject is bittersweet leave-taking.  The songs, dreamily sung by Gundula Janowitz, are Spring, September, Time for Sleep, and At Twilight.
• Psalm 90 – Charles Ives: reportedly one of Ives’ personal favorites, this choral wonder begins with bitonal dissonance, symbolizing  wayward humanity, but resolves into a beautiful hymn accompanied by gently pealing bells, symbolizing the reassuring influence of the church.
• St. Matthew’s Passion – Johann Sebastian Bach: Bach’s dramatic telling the passions according to St. Matthew is conducted by that HIP maestro, John Eliot Gardiner.
• Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) – Gustav Mahler: Mahler’s greatest symphonic song cycle features the song The Drunken Man in Spring
• Viaggio Italiano – Andrea Bocelli:  the popular tenor sings some well-known Neapolitan art songs and famous opera arias

And a lot more…

Enjoy the rest of April!  Thanks for reading my blog and for listening to GotRadio!

-Ron