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CNE and the BSO: A New Era

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 06:26 AM +0000

New Broadcast Era Begins with New BSO Season

Classical New England's Cathy Fuller and Ron Della Chiesa team up as co-hosts

Classical New England, the classical radio service of WGBH, and The Boston Symphony Orchestra, its six-decade broadcast partner, are beginning the orchestra's 132nd concert season with a new broadcast sound from Symphony Hall.

Classical New England’s afternoon host Cathy Fuller is teaming up with longtime Boston Symphony broadcast host Ron Della Chiesa to provide a fresh sound to the live Saturday night broadcasts, as well as to a new afternoon-drive segment BSO Previews. The segment kicks off Friday afternoon, Sept. 21 at 4:00 pm, with an exclusive interview with BSO opening night conductor and soloist, violinist Itzhak Perlman.

“The rapport and good humor between Cathy and Ron during our Tanglewood Turnpike segments last summer was instant and impressive,” noted Benjamin K. Roe, CNE managing director. “Cathy’s companionable style and keen insights into the music world, combined with Ron’s six-decade of experience as a veteran BSO - not to mention Boston – observer makes them a broadcast tandem second to none.”

The new broadcast duo will be heard live every Saturday night starting at 7:00 pm from Symphony Hall, with encore broadcasts on Sundays at 1:00 pm, on the five frequencies of Classical New England, including 99.5 WCRB Boston, and 88.7 WJMF Smithfield/Providence. The Boston Symphony broadcasts also air on public radio stations in Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, and upstate New York. It’s the latest of several initiatives between WGBH and the BSO, including the BSO Concert Channel, a new high-bitrate online audio channel, featuring a 24/7 stream of Boston Symphony Orchestra concert broadcasts. The channel is the first in the nation to offer a continuous, high-quality audio stream of live concerts by one of the world’s great orchestras, and builds on WGBH’s vibrant 60-year broadcast association with the BSO.

With all of these changes, however, comes a milestone for Brian Bell, long-time producer of the BSO broadcasts, who will be leaving CNE. "We are grateful to Brian for his 26 years of dedicated service to WGBH. We all have benefited from his vital role in producing our broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra,” said Roe. “Brian's breadth of knowledge has enriched the experience for listeners and we wish him all the best.”

Classical New England’s new BSO duo is one of several new changes to the weekend schedule. Starting on Sept. 22, Ray Brown will be CNE's new Saturday morning host, waking up greater Boston with his particular blend of music and fascinating stories. Saturday afternoons now belong to Classical New England Music Director Cheryl Willoughby, who says of her additional on-air role, “Sharing great music with other people is a pure pleasure, not work.” Cheryl’s noon – 5:00 pm shift is now followed by Live From Fraser, the station’s signature program of the region’s finest classical artists, performing in the state-of-the-art studio at the WGBH Guest Street headquarters in Boston.

In addition, Classical New England now welcomes to its Sunday lineup From the Top, the program that celebrates the amazing performances and captivating stories of extraordinary young classical musicians. The program, of which WGBH was a Founding Parter, and the New England Conservatory of Music is the home and educational partner, will now be heard Sundays at 11:00 am, right after Laura Carlo's popular Sunday morning program Baroque in Boston.

The Marlboro Festival

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 19:57 PM +0000

Classical New England ventures to Vermont for an encounter with a legendary festival.

Hear the 2012 Marlboro Chamber Music Festival episode of New England Summer Festivals

Hear the 2011 Marlboro Chamber Music Festival episode of New England Summer Festivals

The Marlboro Chamber Music Festival as founded in 1951 by Rudolf Serkin, with Adolf Busch, Hermann Busch and Marcel, Blanche and Louis Moyse.

Co-Artistic Directors are Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode.

Serkin had been Artistic Director until his death in 1991.

Marlboro is 1.5 hours from Williamstown, MA, and 2 hours from Tanglewood.

The 2012 festival begins on July 14 and concludes on August 12, with concerts every Saturday and Sunday, as well as the final two Friday evenings.

The festival is known for an egalitarian approach to music-making among seasoned mentors and exceptional young professionals.

Repertoire for each week's concerts is determined a week before each performance.

Concerts take place at Persons Auditorium on the campus of Marlboro College.

The iconic welcome sign to Marlboro

Its location in southern Vermont makes Marlboro an idyllic getaway, two-and-a-half hours from Boston and four hours from New York City. Many options are available for lodging and for exploring area attractions.

More New England Summer Festivals

The Elements

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 22:19 PM +0000

Join Ray Brown for Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, as heard through music by Stravinsky, Smetana, and more!

Tchaikovsky Discovers America!

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 17:31 PM +0000

Join Ray Brown for the story of the Russian composer's first visit to this country, with music from The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, the 1812 Overture, and more!

Wild West!

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 17:35 PM +0000

Join Ray Brown, for cowboys, rodeos, and the Great American West, with Copland, Grofe, and more!

At the Circus

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 08:04 AM +0000

Join Ray Brown for a trip to the Big Top, with "Entry of the Gladiators," marches by Ives and Stravinsky, and much more!

A Kids' Classical Christmas

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 09:04 AM +0000

Join Ray Brown for traditional carols and Christmas songs as performed by childrens' choirs, soloists, and instrumentalists.
Saturday, Dec. 25 at 9am on 99.5 All Classical

A Request for Beethoven, and music for the holiday

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 11:54 AM +0000

Dec. 24

Today's 4:00 request is from Marc for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, which we'll hear performed by Robert Levin on the fortepiano, with the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique led by John Eliot Gardiner. Continuing the practice he began in his recordings of the Mozart concertos, Levin improvised all of his own cadenzas in the studio, rather than play the ones that Beethoven wrote. My colleague Cathy Fuller asked Levin about the process of creating new cadenzas for Mozart's music, and, especially for Beethoven's First Concerto, I think the same things apply. Check out Cathy's conversations with Robert Levin here.

After the Beethoven we'll play a work that is increasingly associated with the holidays: the music Prokofiev wrote for the film "Lieutenant Kije." While this music has been used in several films (perhaps most memorably in Woody Allen's "Love and Death"), it's quite illuminating to hear the music in its original context. If you have a spare 82 minutes this holiday weekend, you can check out the 1934 film below. It feels like a Soviet version of the Marx Brothers, based on a bitterly satiric novella by Yuri Tynyanov about a nonexistent officer in the Tsar's army who becomes a very convenient fiction.

Beginning at 5:00 we'll play three hours of music (and a bit of radio drama!) for the holidays, including excerpts from The Nutcracker, works by Bach and Corelli, carols sung by Chanticleer, the Boston Camerata, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, and the Handel and Haydn Society Chorus (who will also be singing our holiday broadcast of Handel's Messiah at 8:00 tonight). We'll also hear a few snippets of Patrick Stewart's magnificent audio version of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," as well as a few surprises. All of us here at 99.5 thank you for making us a part of your celebration, and we wish you a joyous and peaceful holiday.

The Snowman

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 11:07 AM +0000

Join Ray Brown for Raymond Briggs’s classic story of The Snowman, with music by Howard Blake, and much more!

The Fiery Kreutzer

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 08:57 AM +0000

Dec. 17

Today's 4:00 Request is from Joel for Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata. Recently, my colleague Laura Carlo posted a beautiful Host Note about the Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven's heart-wrenching letter to his brothers in which he articulates the reasons for his “fiery, active termperament.” Much of this sonata was written at the same time that he wrote that powerful letter, and that temperament can be heard in full force in this sonata's first movement.

It's a movement that the character Posdnicheff describes as "a terrible thing" in Leo Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata, and that ignites the fires of a jealous rage, leading the character to murder his wife. (That novella, in turn, inspired René François Xavier Prinet's painting of 1901, at left, as well as Janacek's first string quartet.) While there's no documented evidence that this piece inspired a murder in real life, its famous title was the result of a jealousy-fueled dispute between Beethoven and its original dedicatee, the violinist George Bridgetower. Originally good friends, they fell in love with the same woman, leading Beethoven to change the dedication to the French violinist Rudolphe Kreutzer, who never performed the sonata that bears his name (otherwise best known for the 42 etudes that torture every young violinist).

This sonata can be considered the dividing line between Beethoven's "early" and "middle" periods. One of the ways in which the differences between the two periods manifest themselves in Beethoven's chamber works is in their scale of expression, and by extension, their implied audience. The third movement of this sonata, which was actually written first and intended for a different piece altogether, sounds like an activity, something that was written primarily for the pleasure of the performers, as well as entertaining for the handful of people who could also fit into the living room.

The first movement, which was the last to be written, is very much a piece for a theater or a concert hall, in which two performers make a compelling public statement as powerful as that of an orchestra, in the way only professional could handle. It could be said that the difference between the so-called early and middle periods is the difference between Beethoven the 18th-century composer and Beethoven the 19th-century composer. It's not unlike the trajectory taken by the Eroica symphony in that regard, from the revolutionary, seams-bursting first movement to the classical variations of the finale based on a theme he had already used in three early-period works.

The years 1801-1806 were transitional for Beethoven; the struggles he mentioned in the Heiligenstadt Testament manifested themselves not only in his forward-looking, fiery, temperamental music, but also in his difficulty in reconciling that temperament with the classical style he been working in his entire life up to that point. As it says in the Testament, he still wanted to be able to engage in relaxation and refined conversations with others, and not to appear misanthropic. But he also wants his condition to be understood, to have us all know what his "hot terrors" feel like. It will take him another few years to figure out how to do that completely successfully, which he finally did in the Fifth Symphony, but his journey toward that point is fascinating, illuminating and moving, and it could be said that journey begins with the Kreutzer Sonata.
(image: Wikimedia Commons)

Faure on Glorious Vinyl

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 10:09 AM +0000

Dec. 10

Today's 4:00 Request comes from Chris, who writes: "Please play 'Pie Jesu' sung by Kathleen Battle (left) from Faure's Requiem. None other will do." We are dedicated here at 99.5; no CD of this performance was found in the WGBH library, but it was found on LP, so the request will be fulfilled via glorious vinyl.

Fulfilling this request seemed like a good way to kick off our holiday programming; in the first hour we will hear carols sung by the Handel and Haydn Society Chorus and the Taverner Choir, instrumental versions of carols as set by the French Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier, and the Evening Prayer and Pantomime from Englebert Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel in an English-language version featuring Jennifer Larmore and Rebecca Evans.

In the 6:00 hour we will broadcast programming in solidarity with the efforts of Kim Kashkashian and her project Music for Food for Music. At that time, they will be performing a benefit concert for the Greater Boston Food Bank at Emmanuel Church. Like the other programs in this series, tonight's program will feature a Mozart Viola Quintet and a "surprise piece by Bach", in Ms. Kashkashian's words. We will show our support for this endeavor by playing Mozart's C major quintet with Kim Kashkashian and the Boromeo Quartet in a concert recording from the Gardner Museum in 2002, preceded by a surprise Bach piece of our own, and while doing so we encourage you to think of those in need this holiday season.

Song of the Unicorn

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:36 AM +0000

Join host Ray Brown for a musical journey through Medieval Times on a show that we call "The Song of the Unicorn."

All in the Family

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 13:58 PM +0000

Join Ray Brown for music from members of great classical music families--including composers like the Mozarts, the Bachs, and more!

An Unfinished Jewel

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:56 AM +0000

Friday, Dec. 3

Today's 4:00 request comes from Bryan of Blackstone, MA: "…With warmth and vocal subtleties hear how Kiri Te Kanawa performs this delicate Mozart aria from the unfinished opera Zaide." The aria is Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben:

Rest easily, my charming loved one,
sleep, until your happiness awakes;
here, I will give you my portrait,
see how cheerfully it smiles at you.
Sweet dreams, rock him to sleep,
and let his passionate ideas
fully ripen at last,
according to his wishes.

Zaide is singing these words to Gomatz as he sleeps. They are both captured slaves of the Sultan Soliman. She has it a little better than he does, since the Sultan favors her and hopes to win her heart, and he is sentenced to hard labor. They plot their escape, with the help of another slave, and are caught.

We never do find out what happens after that, since Mozart never completed the opera. He sketched out music for fifteen numbers, and then abandoned the project in favor of a more comic treatment of a similar subject: The Abduction from the Seraglio. While the world would certainly be poorer without the score of Seraglio, many of those who are familiar with the surviving music for Zaide believe that we may have been denied an even greater work. This aria, at least, has become a concert staple for sopranos of a Mozartian bent, a category to which Dame Kiri te Kanawa certainly belongs.

Today is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, and to help observe that we'll devote the rest of the first hour of today's show to music either written or performed by musicians who faced daunting physical challenges.

The Nature of Music

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 11:26 AM +0000

Join Ray Brown for a walk in nature through music by Dvorak, Smetana, MacDowell, and more!

Once Upon A Time

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 19:53 PM +0000

It's classical music and fairy tales, including "The Frog Prince," "Hansel and Gretel" and more!

Farkle's Search

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 11:13 AM +0000

John Lithgow hosts The Remarkable Farkle McBride, the story of a boy who searches for just the right instrument to play!

Gershwin, Harris, Haydn

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:16 PM +0000

Today's 4:00 request comes from Clay Hopes, listening to us in the picturesque city of Zurich. He wanted to listen to the sisters Katia and Marielle Labeque perform the 2-piano version of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and so he shall, and thanks to him the rest of will enjoy it too.

At 7:00 we'll be playing another important American symphonic work, one that in the decades during and immediately following WWII was found more often on orchestra concert programs than Rhapsody in Blue: the Third Symphony of Roy Harris. Harris was born in a log cabin (really) in the backwoods of Oklahoma; his family moved to California when Roy was five, in 1903. As a young man he fell in love with nature and poetry, and drove a truck for a living while studying music theory. He eventually came to the attention of Aaron Copland, who sent him to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. He learned to compose away from the piano while lying in a hospital bed, having broken his back in a fall. He returned to the US in 1929 and befriended Serge Koussevitzky, who led the premiere of Harris' First Symphony with the BSO in 1933. His most popular work followed two rejections: Koussevitzky disliked Harris' Second Symphony and refused to conduct it, leading to a falling-out between the two men; and not long afterward Jascha Heifetz refused a piece for violin and orchestra he had commissioned from Harris. Harris reworked the violin piece into a symphony and sent it to Koussevitzky; all was forgiven, and after he led the premiere of the work in 1939 the Third Symphony was immediately taken up by many orchestras, hungry for an accessible but substantial American work. As Harris has noted, "Let's not kid ourselves, my Third Symphony happened to come along when it was needed." Harris characterized the work's five sections as Tragic, Lyric, Pastoral, Fugue-Dramatic and Dramatic-Tragic.

After that we'll hear Haydn's Cello Concerto in C major, which bears the distinction of being the most significant twentieth-century discovery of a long-lost eighteenth-century work. There is no record of its having been performed between 1765, when it was presumably written for Joseph Weigl, Esterhazy's principal cellist, and 1961, when it was discovered in a Prague library. Cellists immediately took to it; within ten years of its discovery there were already numerous recordings, several published editions, and had become a standard audition piece for young cellists. Can you think of any recently discovered work by a major composer - or any other kind of artist - that was so immediately embraced? Please comment!

Here's two very different performances of the last movement of the Haydn C major:

Bach's Code

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 09:12 AM +0000

Today's 4:00 request comes from David of Gloucester, RI, who asked to hear Contrapunctus XIV, from The Art of Fugue by J. S. Bach. It's a fugue that Bach never completed, and the last work the composer wrote. It starts with a simple theme in whole notes (heard on the cello at the beginning) and, after working through a slow fugue on that subject (after which any other composer would have written a coda and called it a day), he brings in a second, faster-moving theme to create a double fugue. After developing that for a while, the texture thins and yet another theme enters (that's three now!). This one consists of four notes: B flat - A - C - B natural. In the German musical alphabet, B flat is known simply as B, while B natural is known as H, which means that the theme is: B-A-C-H. So, in what he probably knew would be his final work, Bach weaves in his musical signature. It all adds up to a triple fugue, one of those legendary feats of counterpoint only Bach could have pulled off.

But he still wasn't done! He was planning on introducing a fourth theme, the motto theme that we hear throughout The Art of Fugue but have not yet heard in Contrapunctus XIV. After 239 measures of extraordinary counterpoint, though, we never do get to hear it; just as he's shifting gears yet again, with the tenor voice taking off in the eighth-note theme that would lead to the climactic appearance of the motto, the manuscript abruptly ends... In the words of his son, Carl Philip Emanuel Bach, who edited his father's works after his death: "At the point where the composer introduces the name BACH in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died."

Scholars continue to be divided as to how this should be interpreted. There are those who say that the fugue was never intended to be completed: since The Art of Fugue could be considered a sort of textbook on counterpoint, it's possible that it's up to the student to complete the fugue, which apparently he could if he's been paying attention. In performing this work, the Emerson String Quartet (Bach never specified the instrumentation, so the work has been performed on everything from solo piano to saxophone quartet) has decided to present the work exactly as Bach left it, the viola line hanging in the air, leaving it up to the listener's imagination how it would have ended, or if it's complete as it is. (image: Wikimedia Commons)

There are several musicians who have attempted to rise to Bach's challenge. Here's one:

There are also many composers who have used the B-A-C-H theme as a basis for their own compositions, and we'll open today with one of them: a very un-Bachian Valse-Improvisation based on the theme by Francis Poulenc.

Mozart's Magic Fantasy

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 08:24 AM +0000

Ray Brown hosts a journey through The Magic Flute, with Prince Tamino, the Queen of the Night, Papageno, a dragon, and more!