Religious music, like the religious experience itself, comes in all shapes, forms, moods, and colors.
On today’s date in the year 2002, for example, this setting of the Song of Isaiah had its premiere performance at the Milwaukee Art Museum during a concert by the Present Music ensemble. The...Episode details...
John Birge is the new host of 'Composers Datebook,' the award-winning program about this day in classical music history. A well-known name at Classical Minnesota Public Radio, he will take over from retiring and longtime host John Zech on May 1.
In the 19th century, Richard Wagner composed a cycle of four operas collectively titled “The Ring of the Nibelungen,” lasting 16 hours in performance. In the 20th century, another German composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, wrote a cycle of seven, collectively titled “Light,” which runs about 29...Episode details...
On today’s date in 1942, Warner Brothers released a film entitled “King’s Row,” which included in its cast a 31-year-old actor named Ronald Reagan, who claimed the film “made me a star.” The film’s musical score was by someone already a star – the Austrian-born Erich Wolfgang Korngold, famous...Episode details...
The British composer Gustav Holst lived and worked in a West London neighborhood called Hammersmith for many years—and in 1930, Holst gave that name to a work for wind band he wrote on commission from the BBC.
“Hammersmith” opens with a "Prelude" representing the river Thames, which, said Holst,...Episode details...
In the years following the end of World War II, the “baby boom” led to a dramatic rise in the number of high school and college music programs across the country. By the mid-1950s, a number of well-known American composers started receiving commissions from these schools for new works for wind...Episode details...
A few years back, when RCA records issued a boxed set of 100 favorite Boston Pops recordings made by Arthur Fiedler, they included Handel’s celebrated “Largo.”
Over a hundred years earlier, the Theodore Thomas Orchestra had established this melody as a favorite with 19th century American...Episode details...
A number of the quintessentially “French” operas are set in other lands. Bizet’s “Carmen” is set in Spain and Gounod’s ”Faust” is in Germany, to cite just two examples. But Spain and Germany were familiar next-door neighbors for 19th century Frenchmen, and in that colonizing age, Parisian...Episode details...
In 1952, the West Point Military Band celebrated that famous military academy’s Sesquicentennial by asking prominent composers to write celebratory works to mark the occasion. Among those who responded with a new piece was the American composer Morton Gould, whose “West Point Symphony” received...Episode details...
