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WWUH Classical Programming
June 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
(Opera Highlights Below)
Sunday 2d
Donizetti, L'Elisir d"Amore
Monday 3d
Host's Choice
Tuesday 4th
Reale: Concerto for Cello, Strings and Percussion ‘Live Free or Die”; Creston Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra; Zemlinksy: Lyric Symphony; Adams: City Noir
Drake’s Village Brass Band
Wednesday 5th
Jean-Philippe Rameau: Anacréon (orchestral suite); Michel de la Barre: Pièces pour la flûte traversiere, Book 2: Suite No. 9 in G major; Pietro Antonio Locatelli: Concerto Grosso in F major, Op. 1, No. 1; Johann Sebastian Bach: Cantata for the 1st Sunday after Trinity, "Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot" BWV 39; Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57, "Appassionata"; Caroline Schleicher-Krämer: Clarinet Sonatina; Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 82;
Paul Hindemith: Symphony "Die Harmonie der Welt"; Guillaume Dufay: Sacred and secular songs.
Thursday 6th
Persichetti.: Symphony for Band, Op. 69; Servais: Cello Concerto in b minor, Op. 5; Dvorak: Cello Concerto in b minor, Op. 104; Siegfried Wagner: Glück (symphonic poem); Wagner: Siegfried Idyll; Khachaturian: Masquerade Suite; Gayaneh: Sabre Dance; Stainer: I Saw the Lord.
Friday 7th
Connecticut Summerfest 2024 - an interview and some new music
Sunday 9th
Massenet, Cherubin
Monday 10th
Host’s choice
Tuesday 11th
Silvestrov: Symphony for Violin and Orchestra “Widmung” (Dedication); Maskovsky: Symphony #6; Ives 114 Songs Project Volume 6
Drake’s Village Brass Band Outrageous Fortune – Brett Baker Trombone
Wednesday 12th
Franz Joseph Haydn: Il ritorno di Tobia: Overture, Hob.Ia:2; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Oboe Concerto in C Major, K. 271k / K. 314; Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga: Médée: Hymen, viens dissiper une vaine rayeur; Muzio Clementi: Symphony No. 1 in C Major, WoO 32 (completed by Alfredo Casella, 1938); Michael William Balfe: Le puits d'amour: Overture; Michael William Balfe: Le Puits d'amour: Rves d'amour, rves de gloire; Francesco Cilea: Cello Sonata in D Major, Op. 38; Josef Bohuslav Foerster: Wind Quintet in D Major, Op. 95; Vincenzo Bellini: Il pirata, Act I Scene 7: Aria: Si vencemmo; Giulio Ricordi: Impressions de route: No. 1. Romance poudrée; Paul Viardot: 3 Petites Pièces for Violin and Piano; Johannes Brahms:S 4 Piano Pieces, Op. 119; Louise Bertin: Fausto: verture; Dorothy Howell: Piano Concerto in D Minor; Florence Beatrice Price: Songs of the Oak, Tone Poem; Amy Beach: Symphony in E Minor, Op. 32, "Gaelic"; Mélanie Bonis: Salome, Op. 100 (version for orchestra).
Thursday 13th
Wranitzky: String Sextet in G Major; Eberl: Symphony in E Flat Major Op. 33; Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 in E Flat Major Op. 55 ‘Eroica’; Chávez: Suite de Caballos de Vapor (Horse Power Suite); Bernstein: Candide: Make Our Garden Grow; Falla: Noches en los jardines de España; Grainger: Country Gardens; Ketèlbey: In a Monastery Garden
Friday 14th
For 3 pence, you can meet “The Knife” and other unsavory characters
Sunday 16th
Dibdin, The Ephesian Matron, The Brickdust Man, The Grenadier, The Jane Austen Songbooks
Monday 17th
Host's Choice
Tuesday 18th
Copland 12 Poems of Emily Dickinson; Schickele: A Year in the Catskills: Schmidt: Symphony #3; Satie: Mercure Ballet
Drake’s Village Brass Band – Grimethorpe Colliery Band, The Brass Band Music of Johan De Meij
Wednesday 19th
Host's Choice
Thursday 20th
Kraus: Symphony in c minor, VB 142; Offenbach: Cello Concerto in G Major ‘Concerto-Rondo’; Orphée aux Enfers Overture, Le Voyage dans la lune Overture; Whiting: Bagatelles.
Friday 21st
It’s Summertime, Summertime – Sum-Sum Summertime!
Sunday 23d
Strauss, Intermezzo
Monday 24th
Host's Choice
Tuesday 25th
Tuesday Night at the Movies … Schickele: Silent Running; John Mauceri – The Genuis of Film Music Hollywood Blockbusters 1960-1990
Drake’s Village Brass Band – Broughton: Horn Concerto; Williams: Trumpet Concerto; Rota: Trombone Concerto
Wednesday 26th
Jean-Philippe Rameau: Abaris ou les Boréades (orchestral suite); John Dowland: Farewell; Johann Sebastian Bach: Solo Cantata for the Feast of Nativity of St John the Baptist, "Ihr Menschen, rühmet Gottes Liebe", BWV 167; Joseph Haydn: Symphony No. 45 in F# minor, Hob.I:45, "Farewell";
Jan Ladislav Dussek: Piano Sonata in E-flat major, Op. 44, "The Farewell";
Ludwig van Beethoven: Sonata No. 26 in E-flat major, Op. 81a "Les Adieux"; Fryderyk Chopin: Waltz No. 9 in A-flat major, Op. 69, No. 1, "L'adieu"; Gustav Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, No. 6, "Der Abschied";
Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry: Songs of Farewell; David Schonfeld: Ki Telekh;
Thursday 27th
Coste: Rondeau de concert avec introduction, Op. 12; Walker: Lyric for Strings; Went: Partita in d-sharp minor; New Additions to the WWUH Library.
Friday 28th
If you don’t know what the “B Side” is, ask Wild Wayne. [Music of Mason Bates]
Sunday 30th
Laminsky, As One, Offenbach, The Island of Tulipatan
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SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT THE OPERA
your "lyric theater" program
with Keith Brown
Programming for the month of June 2024
SUNDAY JUNE 2ND Donizetti, L'Elisir d'Amore Gaetano Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore (1832) is a classic of the bel canto era. Equally popular in the same period was a French comic opera by Auber, Le Philtre (1831), which parallels L'Elisir in every way: melodious and passionate music set to an almost identical libretto. Yet Le Philtre is forgotten today, while L'Elisir continues to hold the stage. If even for one glorious melody alone,"Una Furtiva Lagrima," the fame of Donizetti's opera would be forever ensured. Against the advice of his librettist Donizetti insisted on inserting this sad, sweet song into the second act. Only once before have I featured the Donizetti "Love Potion" lyric comedy. That was on Sunday, July 7, 1996. After so long an absence from the airwaves of WWUH it finally gets your audition again today in a classic 1971 taping of the work for Decca/London. Richard Bonynge directs the English Chamber Orchestra and Ambrosian Opera Chorus. Bonynge's wife, soprano Joan Sutherland is heard as Adina, and joining the diva as the country bumpkin Nemorino is the late great tenor Luciano Pavarotti. Decca reissued the vintage recording on compact disc in 1985.
SUNDAY JUNE 9TH Massenet, Cherubin Imagine a French romantic comedy that picks up where Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro" leaves off with the character of the horny teenager Cherubino. That's the premise of Jules Massenet's seventeenth opera Cherubin (1903), where the boy has now matured somewhat into a rather charming and more sophisticated seventeen year old. He's still pretty silly, and a tender and harmless, non-macho character after all- one who might appeal to opera-going audiences. The playwright Francis de Croisset granted Massenet the rights to render his sentimental stage comedy into operatic form. It premiered, appropriately for a romantic opera, on Valentine's Day. Not much of the novelist Beaumarchais' original story has survived in this adaptation, but Massenet's music is delightful and deserves to be better known. Mezzo Frederica von Stade took on Cherubin as a "breeches role" in the 1991 recording of Massenet's opera, made in the studios of Radio Bavaria, Munich. She had essayed the role previously in 1984 in a semi-staged production at Carnegie Hall, and she made Mozart's Cherubino her own, too. Baritone Samuel Ramey was with her then, singing the part of Cherubin's worldly-wise tutor, dubbed "The Philosopher." He rejoins her in this recording. The love interest here is L'Ensoleillad, the role sung by soprano June Anderson. Pinchas Steinberg directs the Munich Radio Orchestra and Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera. Reviewing the 1992 BMG Classics/RCA Red Seal release on silver disc. Fanfare magazine's critic Anthony D. Coggi has pronounced it "Recommended."
SUNDAY JUNE 16TH Dibdin, The Ephesian Matron, The Brickdust Man, The Grenadier, The Jane Austen Songbooks Sure, Vienna was the music capital of the Western World in the latter eighteenth century. This was the era of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, after all. But London was an even greater international capital, and after the death of Handel continued to have a burgeoning scene for all manner of musicmaking, and lyric theater,too. Active in London's music theater culture then was Charles Dibdin (1745-1814), who wrote short comic operatic works for Covent Garden and Drury Lane and lesser venues as well. These English language works were tuneful pleasantries: by turns silly, witty, satirical, amorous and sentimental singing sitcoms. Baroque specialist Peter Holman and his Opera Restor'd singers and players staged and recorded reconstructions of Dibdin's oeurve for the British Hyperion label. Chief among these is the comic serenata The Ephesian Woman (1769),plus two more slender musical dialogues, The Brickdust Man (1772) and The Grenadier (1773). Hear all three today as presented on a single 1992 Hyperion CD release.
England's famous female novelist of this period, Jane Austen (1775-1807) was a considerable amateur musician. She played piano quite well and copied out for her own use in provincial home musicmaking sessions a quantity of short vocal pieces which would have remained popular in London into Napoleonic times. Dibdin's songs were among these pieces. Handel, Gluck and Ignace Pleyel were also represented in chamber arrangements, along with tunes by a score of now obscure English musical figures. Austen seems to have had good musical taste as witnessed in these preserved handwritten songbooks. Generous recorded excerpts from them have been issued in two compact disc compilations, Jane's Hand (Vox,1996) and Jane Austen Entertains (Classical Communications,Ltd., 2007). Various vocal soloists are accompanied on harpsichord or pianoforte, with baroque violin or wooden flute obbligato parts in some cases, giving the sound of it all a true "period' quality.
SUNDAY JUNE 23RD Strauss, Intermezzo In baroque opera the intermezzo was a brief, small-scale contemporary domestic comedy in music inserted between the acts of a full-length Italian opera seria to provide "comic relief" from a serious subject out of ancient classical lore. Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona (1734) is the classic example of the genre, which would morph into the Italian opera buffa we know from Rossini. Richard Strauss remembered the intermezzo genre when he composed his own work by that name. Strauss' Intermezzo (1924) does not have a libretto by his usual collaborator Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who declined the project. After having dealt with serious classical subjects, as in his Ariadne (1912, rev. 1916), he wanted to create, in his own words, "a completely modern, absolutely realistic psychological comedy." What he came up with, this time collaborating with Hermann Bahr, was "a little marriage opera," a mannered bourgeois comedy set in Vienna and environs, dealing with a conductor at the Vienna Opera and his wife. Her accusations of infidelity are quashed by means of a simple spelling error. Intermezzo makes use of Strauss' latest advances in his style of lyric theater composition, but his usual big orchestral sound has been subdued here. Allowance is made for spoken-word melodram. Intermezzo was recorded for EMI in 1980 in cooperation with Radio Bavaria, Munich. Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is heard as the Hofkapellmeister, opposite soprano Lucia Popp as his wife, aka Kleine Franzl. Wolfgang Sawallisch conducts the Symphony Orchestra of Bavarian Radio. EMI reissued the recording on compact disc in 1988.
SUNDAY JUNE 30TH Kaminsky, As One, Offenbach, The Island of Tulipatan I like to designate the last Sunday in June as Stonewall Sunday, referring to the Stonewall Inn gay bar and the gay riot that took place in Greenwich Village on the last weekend in June,1969. The Stonewall Rebellion in New York City gave birth to the gay liberation movement in the United States and worldwide, and to so much of the history of the struggle for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights that would follow. On Stonewall Sunday I like to program lyric theater music by LGBT or queer composers or performers or on some gay-related theme. This Stonewall Sunday of 2024 I present back-to-back two short operas that deal with the trans part of the equation, the first one serious in nature, the second one a gender-bending comedy. First comes Laura Kaminsky's As One (2014), a chamber opera for two singers, male and female, who are "as one" in one human personality named Hannah. Baritone Kelly Markgraf is Hannah before transition, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke is Hannah after her transition into her new gender identity. The string players of the Fry Street Quartet back the singers in a three-part cycle of fifteen song sequences. As One traces Hannah's progression from her youth in a small Midwestern town to her college years on the West Coast and finally to the Arctic coast of Norway, where she experiences a revelation about herself. As One was commissioned and developed by American Opera Projects. American composer Laura Kaminsky (b.1956) has served on the faculty of the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and is in a same-sex marriage relationship. Along with its top-reviewed 2019 CD recording for Bright Shiny Things, Kaminsky's chamber opera is one of the most performed works of its kind worldwide. Many new productions of it are now very much non-binary when it comes to the singers. There are precedents in Western music history for a "trans opera." On Sunday, June 18, 2000 I presented a Swedish Sterling Records CD recording of excerpts from Wilhelm Stenhammar's Tirfing (1898), which has a leading character who could be described as female-to-male transgender- and a Viking swordsman at that! Jacques Offenbach's The Island of Tulipatan (1868) is a gay little burlesque of a French operetta in one act. It received its first English language recording by LOONY, or Light Opera of New York, made live-in-performance at New York City's Theater 80 in 2017. The translation of the French libretto is in entirely idiomatic modern American English. On the nonexistent island of the title a prince becomes a princess and a princess turns into a prince. This Offenbach comic rarity is an absolute hoot! Tyson Deaton conducts the little pit orchestra and a cast of five singers. Albany Records released The Island of Tulipatan on a single compact disc. I last presented it on Stonewall Sunday, June 24, 2018.
keithsbrown1948@gmail.com
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