Guest Host Helena Della: My Favorites

Saturday's show was presented by Helena Della, a guest host!

Here's the transcript.  Helena Della writes:

Surprise, it’s not Arch, it’s Helena Della, your guest host tonight for the Archives!   Arch has graciously invited me to play whatever I like, as long as at least half the program is classical.

Most of what I like in classical music I absorbed as a very small child, when it came pouring out of my parents’ Hi Fi.   It is so easy to picture my mother’s head bobbing and elbows flying as she ironed in time to the music, or my father puffing on his 99th cigar and sipping his third whiskey, with his elbows on the kitchen table and his face in a book.

Part A: Music my Mom would have enjoyed.

Mom, Anne Moller, loved warm, emotional composers like Gershwin, Prokofiev, Debussy, and Ravel.  She had a rich alto voice and adored choral music.  My Dad, George Moller had a lot of folk music in his collection – the Brothers Four, Leon Bibb, and some marvelous 78s of traditional English folk songs.  His classical taste was light and lively.  Enesco rhapsodies, Chabrier, and Rossini were up his alley.  He also admired classical guitar.

Here are three of mom’s:  Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3; with Martha Argerich and the Berlin Philharmonic; then Philip Glass’ Beauty and the Beast, played by Angele Dubeau and Pieta; and finally, “My Man’s Gone Now” from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, sung by Inez Matthews for the 1959 movie version.

Part B: Some music from Dad's collection, and more.

From my Dad’s collection, first we’ll hear Chabrier’s Espana, played by Michel Plasson and the Toulouse Capitol Orchestra, then Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance with the Royal Philarmonic, and a selection from Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco’s Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra.   That one is played by Miguel Gomez-Martinez and the English Chamber Orchestra.

The next two coming up are:  Signor Bruschino Overture by Rossini, with Neville Mariner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.  Then two Debussy piano arabesques played by Alain LeFevre.

Part C: More Helena Della favorites

The next set of two are performed again by the all-female Canadian ensemble, Angele Dubeau and Pieta.  Archie and I saw these women at Bucknell a few years ago, they are wonderful performers.  Angéle Dubeau can make her Stradivarius do anything she wants.   The CD named Fairy Tales was made for lullaby time.  Parents, are you listening?  This stuff puts me in a serene and restful state of mind, so it should work well on small rambunctious children.  (It’s better than strangling them.)  First, we will hear Fantasia para un Gentilhombre, then another version of Beauty and the Beast, this time not by Philip Glass but by Francois Dompierre.

Part D: Wake Up!

Wake up! Want to hear “Lost in Space” played by the Czech Philharmonic?  How about a ditty called “Birds Chirping” played on a Wurlitzer Theatre Organ?  (That’s played by an organ roll, not a person.)  And I KNOW you need to hear Enesco’s Roumanian Rhapsody No. 2 played on the harmonica (by Larry Adler).

[I did not introduce the next three, because they were chosen after the announcements were taped.  They are the King's Singers, who usually sing a capella, but are accompanied here by a few instruments, singing three unidentified songs.  These were recorded for me by Arch back in 2009, and we weren't very careful about keeping track of the names of the pieces.  But Arch still has the CDs, and if you're interested, we can do some research.]

Part E:  Crossover and New Age music before New Age was born.

Renaissance,
Gryphon, and
Winter Consort

To finish up, I want to play some music of the 70s that uses classical instruments played by classically trained musicians, but adding rock influences.  Remember Gryphon, King Crimson, Emerson Lake and Palmer, the Moody Blues, and all those classy, rich rock songs of the early 70s?  You’ll recognize most of what I have coming up next.  On the air, I promised to put the playlist right here, and here it is:

Stupidity Tries: Radiohead, performed by Christopher O'Riley
Running Hard: Renaissance, vocals by Annie Haslam
Second Spasm: Gryphon
Black Flame: Renaissance, Annie Haslam
Icarus: Paul Winter Consort
Opening Move: Gryphon
Bordel 1900: Astor Piazzola, performed by Al di Meola

[Added by Archie: the amazing Annie Haslam was performing as recently as two years ago; search for her on YouTube.]

Thanks for everything, and become a member and support the Station!

Helena Della

Songs

The show on Songs aired as scheduled.  Here are the podcast files for the show, in four quarters.

Part A
Part B
Part C
Part D

This is one of the earliest shows I put together, and one with which I was most pleased when it was finished.  If you go back to the blog post for when it first aired, there is mention of a bad bass rumble.  It turns out that my own subwoofer was turned up a little too high, and when the station software turns up the bass just a little ö—most of the music it plays sounds a little better with a punchier bass, I suppose— the result was a little overwhelming.

My script for the show is incomplete; as the deadline grew closer, I threw the script out and ad-libbed the introductions to each song, or just left them completely out!  So here are short remarks to go with each song.  All the featured works were songs, or more properly, arias.

Michael Arne: The Lass with the Delicate Air
Michael Arne was the son of Thomas Arne, who wrote Rule Britannia, which, as I remarked on the show, was a wildly patriotic British anthem, still sung on patriotic occasions over there.

This song, a very lighthearted one, was sung by Julie Andrews in an early recording, when she was in her twenties, at most.  There is rather an affected flourish with which she ends it, but it doesn’t seem inappropriate for the song, in retrospect.

Thomas Arne: Where the Bee Sucks
This is a song very well known in Britain, taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  Emma Kirkby, one of Britain’s greatest sopranos, married to Christopher Hogwood, incidentally, does a great job, as does Mr. Hogwood himself in the accompaniment.

Kurt Weill: Moritat Vom Mackie Messer
Lotte Lenya, who was said to be Kurt Weill’s muse, made this song from The Threepenny Opera popular throughout Europe, and then the song went on to be a hit for American singers from Louis Armstrong to Bobby Darrin, in its English translation as Mack the Knife.  We merged two recordings: one with Lotte Lenya singing it in German, with a second one where she sings it with Louis Armstrong in English.

Joseph Haydn: Nun beut die Flur
Milton’s Paradise Lost was proposed to Joseph Haydn as a possible libretto for an oratorio.  The gentleman who brought it to Haydn’s attention provided a German translation, and the result was one of the greatest entries in the oratorio form: Haydn’s Creation.  In this song, the Angel Gabriel wonders at the beauty of the newly-created flora.  The soprano is Helen Donath, who was born in Texas, but went on to excel in German opera in Germany and Vienna.

P. D. Q. Bach: Now is the season
P.D.Q. Bach is the fictional 20th son on Johann Sebastian Bach, an invention of Peter Schickele, the talented and imaginative American composer and graduate from Juilliard, who performed in Williamsport around 1985 in the Scottish Rite Auditorium.  The aria, sung by the brilliant Lorna Haywood, is from the Oratorio The Seasonings.  (In case you miss the joke, there is more than one Oratorio named The Seasons, notably one by Haydn.)

Schumann: Der Nussbaum
This is a beautiful Lied, by Robert Schumann, sung by Emmy Ameling.  (Der Nussbaum means The Nut Tree.)

Tom Lehrer: Poisoning Pigeons In The Park
Possibly the best known song by Tom Lehrer, this song should be sung in April, ideally.  Someone who was around in the spring of 1965 would be better able to describe the facts around the curious title: did they actually poison pigeons back then?  They must have, otherwise the song would not be so funny.

George Harrison: All Things Must Pass
This was one of George Harrison’s most lovely songs, but I think this rendering by Paul McCartney, during a memorial concert for George Harrison, is almost better than George’s own, but that might be sacrilege.

Richard Strauss: Im Abendrot
A cousin of the Waltz Strausses, Richard Strauss is best known today for writing the tone poem Thus Spake Zarathustra, whose stunning opening theme was borrowed by Stanley Kubrik for 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Strauss wrote Four Last Songs, a tour-de-force of Wagnerian songwriting, and this is one of them: Im Abendrot---at Sunset.  You hear birds flying away several times, depicted by a pair of trilling flutes.  I don’t understand the original German, but I would venture a guess that it is about departure.

J. S. Bach: Mein glaubiges Herze
This is a complete reversal of mood, quite unintentionally.  This aria from Cantata 68 is a reworking (a parody aria) of an earlier aria from a Secular Cantata, about Hercules at the Crossroads, or something like that.  At any rate, in the earlier tune, there is an extensive postlude that goes on for about a minute.  When Bach borrowed the tune for his church cantata, he could not bring himself to abbreviate the long postlude, so it remains as an extended ending to Mein glaubiges Herze (My joyful heart, or “My heart ever faithful,” in the versified English translation.  This is sung by Julianne Baird, Professor Emeritus of music at Rutgers, accompanied by the Aulos Ensemble.

Richard Wagner: The Making of the Prize Song
I introduced the Overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, in an earlier show.  Walther von Stoltzing is a young aristocrat who comes into Nuremburg to meet with Hans Sachs, a skilled poet and composer of the 16th century, to further his musical education.  While there, he sees and falls in love with Eva, the young daughter of the city Goldsmith.  Unfortunately, the Goldsmith, who is the President of the Guild of Mastersingers, has promised that the winner of the annual song competition shall have first choice to marry Eva.  (If Eva turns the song champion down, she must remain unmarried for life.  Evidently they had moved beyond forced marriages, at least in Wagner’s imagination.)

Walther, once he learns of this, is desperate to join the Guild, and win the competition, which is impossible.  But this is opera, so he succeeds.  In this scene, Hans Sachs helps the young fellow to write a suitable song in the required form, for the competition.  I rudely provide a translation as a sort of voice-over.

Steve Goodman: City Of New Orleans
You should read up the history of this song, which was made popular by Arlo Guthrie (the son of Woody Guthrie).

J. S. Bach: Vergnügte Ruh
This lovely Bach aria is sung by Guillemette Laurens, and accompanied by Diego Fasolis and I Barrochisti.

Arthur Sullivan: Yum-Yum's Song
This is a lovely aria from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, sung here by Marie McLaughlin.

Edie Brickel: 'Stwisted
Texan Edie Brickel first became famous as a singer songwriter with her group the New Bohemians.  Edie Brickel was later married to Paul Simon.  This is sung by long-time Williamsport resident Uma, with her now-defunct group Episodes.

Meredith Willson: Till There Was You
Paul McCartney loved this song from The Music Man, and sang it with the Beatles in an early album.  There is a lovely acoustic guitar interlude, which gives it a sort of C & W flavor.

Nelson Lee: Welela
One of Miriam Makeba’s best known songs.  Miriam Makeba, a brilliant South African singer, was admired and promoted by Harry Belafonte.

Anonymous Folk Melody: Deep River
This song was made popular by Paul Robeson, and featured in the movie Showboat.  Here it is sung by Bryn Terfel, the Welsh bass.

P. I. Tchaikovsky: None but the Lonely Heart
Paul Robeson sings this Tchaikovsky song, which has been frequently reviled as being too sentimental.  Evidently the words are a translation of a poem by Johann von Goethe

Giaccomo Puccini: O mio babbino caro
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sings this well-known Puccini aria.

Paul Simon: Still Crazy After All These Years
From the album There goes Rhymin’ Simon comes this Paul Simon song, with a lovely saxophone interlude.

W. A. Mozart: Laudate Dominum
In my younger days I bought a Laserlight CD of The Best of Mozart, and this lovely piece was in it, sung by Maria Zadori.  I have never heard anything sung by this lady with such a lovely voice since, but I tried to find out more about her, and have only turned up that she is Hungarian, and a Handel expert.  Unfortunately, European Handel experts are seldom heard in the US, since Brits have got a lock on all things Handelian.

Björk: Human Behavior
This whimsical singer from Iceland has created some amazing songs, which were brought to my attention by my daughter.


Tomás Méndez: Cucurucucu Paloma
This song written in 1954 was performed by numerous singers, including Harry Belafonte, who sings it here.

George and Dhani Harrison: Horse to the Water
This song was one of the last sung by George Harrison, with Jools Holland’s Blues Band.  On the Concert for George, it was performed by Sam Brown, and this track is taken from the video performance.

WXPI is trying very hard to attract more listeners, and we're trying to expand and improve our website.  One thing we're going to do is to put a brief music file, a sampler of the type of material on the show.  Here's the track I will be putting there, as soon as it can be arranged.  Take a listen, and write in your suggestions!

Archie

Show 115: Chamber Music

[Added on 2015/7/18:  This used to be called Show 15.  I've renumbered the shows, so that this one is Show115.  For instance, the July 4^th show for this year will be numbered numbered Show201, and so on.  If you didn't figure this out yet, my first show aired the week of July 4th, 2014.]

First of all, WXPI is going to present a radio play sometime soon.  Archie, Veronica, Betty and Jughead ride again in this silly little skit about the holiday season.  I got to play one of the most interesting roles in it; I'll tip you the wink when I find out when it airs.

Today's show has been uploaded already, and will hit the airwaves tonight at 8:00.  However, I'm trying something new, and it might get screwed up.  Basically, instead of preparing twenty or twenty-five independent files (I explained why that was desirable a couple of weeks ago), I prepared four half-hour (actually, 28-minute) segments.  This means that the station doesn't get to break in at random times between files.  But if for some reason the station does break in, it will screw up royally, because it will discard an enormous chunk of music.  I guess I am playing with fire.

Anyhoo, here are the links to the podcast.

Part A:  Bach, Brahms, Mozart, Dvorák

Mozart:  Clarinet Quintet in A
This is an amazing work, possibly one of Mozart's best known.  Every movement is a jewel of perfection; this is the opening movement.  I have played the slow movement before.

Brahms: Sextet in B Flat
A lovely piece by Brahms, for a string quartet (two violins, a viola and a cello) with one additional viola and cello each.


Dvorák: Bagatelles, Op. 47
This is a quartet for an unusual combination: two violins, a cello, and a harmonium.  Harmoniums are little pedal organs where the sound is from reeds.  Not the sort of reeds you get in clarinets and bassoons, but the sort you get in a harmonica, or a piano accordion: a tiny brass strip tuned to a particular note.  I'm breaking with my usual habit of playing just one movement, and playing four of these bagatelles, because they're so delightful.  Warning: the set is interrupted in the middle by the station break, so the last couple continues afterwards.

Part B: Schubert, Thomas Morley

Schubert: Octet for clarinet, horn, bassoon & strings in F major
I was obsessed with Octets for some time, and I saw this Schubert octet on the shelf, and I got all excited.  When it arrived, I just loved it.  Schubert was as much of a genius as Mozart, especially in the department of melodic invention.  This is the first movement of an octet that was written for a string quartet, augmented with an oboe, a clarinet, a horn and a bassoon.  It is Archibudelli (which means ancient strings, because they play either original seventeenth century instruments, or reproductions of such instruments), and Mozzafiato, a word whose meaning I do not know.  Mozzafiato is led by Charles Neidich, who performed at the Community Arts Center (in Williamsport, Our Fair City) in the nineties.

Thomas Morley: Now is the month of Maying
This is a madrigal, sung by the King's Singers, who are all alumni of the King's College Cambridge Choir School.

Part C: Schubert, Mendelssohn, Bach, Mozart

Schubert: Piano Quintet (The Trout) - IV
Schubert wrote a lot of songs, and one of the most popular was one about a trout.  He later wrote a Piano Quintet, called The Trout Quintet, in which one movement is an air and variations on the tune of the song The Trout.  This is that movement.  The performers include Alfred Brendl on the piano.

Mendelssohn: Octet for strings in E flat major-Scherzo
The Scherzo from Mendelssohn's Octet from String is a lovely piece that features the sort of fairy music that Mendelssohn was so brilliant at, and which you hear in his Midsummer Night's Dream overture.  This is Hausmusic, London led by Monica Huggett.

Bach: Trio Sonata 1 in E Flat, ii
I have played the first movement of this one already for you, in our very first broadcast.  Here is the slow movement, played on a pedal harpsichord by E. Power Biggs.  A pedal harpsichord is just a harpsichord with a pedalboard, which is a keyboard intended to be played with the feet.

Mozart: String Quartet No 17 in B flat major ('Hunt')
Haydn and Mozart sort of taught each other to write string quartets.  Haydn is generally credited with inventing the genre, and immediately afterwards, Mozart heard some of them, and was soon writing even more beautiful string quartets, which Haydn got to hear, after which Haydn wrote some more fabulous quartets, and so on.  This is the Hunt quartet by Mozart, no. 17 in B Flat.

Part D: Mozart, Camerata Brasil, Wagner, Ravel

Mozart: Serenade in E-flat major K375- Adagio
This is a Mozart Serenade.  These were written for a small ensemble of maybe seven or eight instruments, but it is not chamber music at all, in fact it is outdoor music.  Bands of amateur musicians formed themselves into little performing groups, and serenaded homes from the street, a little like Christmas Caroling.  This is a lovely slow movement from the E Flat major serenade.

Vou Vivendo - Camerata Brasil
Taken from an album titled Bach in Brasil, this highly rhythmic little movement is played by the string band Camerata Brasil.

Wagner: Siegfried Idyll
Now, Wagner was unhappily married, but around 1870, he fell in love with the daughter of Franz Liszt, Cosima, who happened to be married to the conductor Hans Von Bulow.  After a while, the respective spouses allowed the two of them to move in together, and they had a child, the famous Siegfried Wagner, who at one time controlled Wagner’s opera hall in Bavaria, called Bayreuth.  Anyway, either Siegfried’s or his mother’s birthday was Christmas Day, I believe, so Wagner wrote this lovely, lovely one instrument-per-part tone poem, called Siegfriend Idyll, and early morning on Christmas Day, arranged for thirteen players to play it on the stairs of his grand home in the hills of Munich, or wherever his home was.  Ironically, this piece written for a small group of thirteen or so instruments is better known and loved that many of Wagner’s larger-scaled works for an orchestra of more than 100 instruments.

Ravel: Introduction and Allegro
Here is a relatively infrequently played piece by Maurice Ravel for a string quartet, flute, clarinet and harp.  It runs for more than 10 minutes, but I’ll play about four minute of it.  This is James Galway, Richard Stoltzman, and Heidi Lehwalder on Flute, Clarinet and Harp, respectively.

How did Archie make that Scary Introduction last Saturday?

Heh heh!

It was done using my all-purpose sound editor, Audacity.

Given a piece of sound, Audacity can do lots of things with it.

(1) Make it louder or softer.
(2) Edit it; that is cut piece of sound out of one place, and insert in another place; trim a piece of music as desired, and rearrange it.
(3) Speed it up, which means of course, the pitch rises.  Or slow it down.
(4) Speed it up or slow it down at the same pitch.  This is very clever; the piece is analyzed into individual notes, and the frequencies of each note, and its duration.  Then the duration is increased, leaving the frequency alone, and finally the piece is reassembled.
(4) Raise or lower the pitch, keeping the speed (the Tempo) as it is.

What I did is to [1] make a copy of the initial segment of the tune, where I say: "If you or someone you love ...".
[2] Then I pasted it somewhere away from the Intro, and raised the pitch an augmented fourth.  This is an interval that sounds unsettling (for instance, B to F).
Then [3] I pasted the modified copy alongside the original.  Now I had two voices, speaking exactly an augmented fourth apart.  If it had been two different people speaking at the same time, it would have sounded quite normal.  But since it was me speaking at two pitches, it sounded strange.  In addition, the music, too, was shifted.  That was the whole thing!

Actually, I did one more step.  Audacity can, in addition,

(5) Do a sound effect called Phaser.  What this does is to switch the Stereo channels back and forth from Left to Right in such a way that it seems to rotate around the room.  It is a combination of gradually switching channels, and making them louder and softer in rotation.  (This effect was available in Hammond Organs back in the Sixties, by rotating speakers inside the speaker boxes, and it was called Leslie!  Nobody has rotating speakers anymore, but a fake Leslie effect can be obtained with this Phaser effect, and it is actually superior to Leslie.  It can be used over the speakers in an Auditorium, for instance, which you could not do with old-time Leslie.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed all that nonsense, and how it was done!

Archie.

Show 113 Finally

[Added on 2015/7/18:  This used to be called Show 13.  I've renumbered the shows, so that this one is Show113.  For instance, the July 4^th show for this year will be numbered numbered Show201, and so on.  If you didn't figure this out yet, my first show aired the week of July 4th, 2014.]

Show 13 did finally air, but there were enormous technical errors, mostly centering around the automatic crossfading that the Master Program had been set to do.  This is a setting in which each music track is faded out and the next track is faded in, in an overlapping way.  Unfortunately, it doesn't work at all well for speech, as it does for music.  Normally, crossfading is set for about two seconds of overlap, but I suspect that last night it was set for more.  It effectively shortened the 2-hour broadcast to an hour and twenty minutes.  It is frustrating, but I take it on the bump as we used to say (a saying that derives from the game of Cricket, which I have not really played.)

Anyway, here we are with the podcast.  I don't do a podcast for the actual broadcast because that doesn't allow me to put the performer and the album information into the metadata (the stuff that shows up on your car radio while the music is playing.  Actually, I have an older car, and the stuff doesn't show up, anyway.)

Part A (28 minutes, more or less): Handel, Bach, Mozart

Handel: Overture to The Watermusic.  Handel was initially the court composer of the court of Elector Georg of Hanover.  He was a rising musical star in his youth, and managed to get leave of his master to travel in Italy.  He kept extending his leave, and eventually landed in Britain, where his music was so appreciated that he stayed on for several years.  To his horror, on the death of the British monarch, Georg of Hanover ascended to the British Throne, and Handel was in the awkward position of having played hooky from his job in Germany for several years.  But the resourceful Handel arranged to accompany a water party on the Thames given by George, and play music specially composed for the occasion from a barge (or barges), and regained favor with His Majesty.  Anyway, that's the story.  This overture is the first movement of the music composed for that occasion.  [Raymond Leppard, English Chamber Orchestra]

Some centuries later, Sir Hamilton Harty, who was one of the principal organizers of the London Proms, arranged extracts from the Watermusic into a more Victorian, sumptuous romantic score, which was immensely popular in the 2oth Century, but in the Sixties, the original work regained popularity, with the rediscovery of Baroque orchestras and instruments.

Bach: Overture to Suite No. 1 in C major.  This is a grand piece for large orchestra from the time of Bach's stay in the Ducal court of Weimar.  The entire orchestral suite is lovely.  [Akademie fur Alte Music, Berlin]

Handel: Overture to Messiah.  Notice the characteristic dotted rhythms of the slow introduction, which is followed by a faster contrapuntal section, after which the slow section returns.  This ABA form is often expanded by repetition into an ABABA form, with greater ornamentation in the later repeats.  [London Philharmonic Orchestra, John Alldis]

Mozart: Overture to The Marriage of Figaro.  The overture, which was composed at the last minute, is one of the best-known works of Mozart, and is an exciting romp of just about 5 minutes.  While musically it is hardly remarkable, it is all elegance and style, and manages to focus all the attention on the play itself, and not on the music.  [Origin uncertain!  Could be any one of a number of my personal collection of recordings...]

Part B (28 minutes): Mozart, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Beethoven

Mozart: Overture to The Magic Flute.  The Magic Flute was composed as a singspiel, which literally means musical play.  It was a deliberate attempt to depart from the Italian-dominated opera tradition towards a more folk-centered German theatrical tradition which was gaining popularity with the people.  As mentioned earlier, it had a strong masonic flavor, though ultimately the masonic elements are of greater interest to the Freemasons and historians than to music-lovers.

The overture is a marvel of construction, in utter contrast to the previous one.  The heavy brass in the trombones is a huge contrast to the light, fluffy orchestration of Figaro.  [Staatskapelle, Dresden; Colin Davis]

Beethoven:  Overture to Fidelio.  Beethoven wrote just one opera, Fidelio, and he labored over an appropriate overture to it.  (Presumably Mozart was a tough act to follow.)  The opera is highly regarded, at least by Beethoven fanatics.  Beethoven wrote a total of four overtures to the opera, and this one is the most frequently performed with the opera, at least that's what I understand.  I was seriously underwhelmed by the piece, and I apologize for cutting it short.  [Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell]

Mendelssohn: Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream.  The Mendelssohn family loved Shakespeare to pieces, and in his youth, young Felix wrote this amazing overture, as well as incidental music to accompany the play.  I am not sure of the details, but there is enough incidental music to suggest that the play was performed with the music in Mendelssohn's lifetime.  The family was very well off, and Felix and his sister and friends often put on various plays and performances in the house, which were attended by a large circle of friends.  [London Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado]

Handel:  Air from Watermusic.  This was a centerpiece of the Hamilton Harty arrangement.  It is a lovely horn tune, which found its way into easy pieces for piano and practically every conceivable instrument. [Raymond Leppard, English Chamber Orchestra]



Part C (28 minutes): Mendelssohn, Wagner, Frederick Loewe

Mendelssohn: Fingal's Cave Overture.  Written to commemorate a visit to Fingal's Cave in the Hebrides, in Scotland.  [London Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado]

Brahms: Academic Festival Overture.  Written in response to being awarded an honorary doctorate at Breslau U.  [BBC Philharmonic Orchestra]

Wagner: Overture to Die Meistersinger.  Most of the overture, with voice-over identifying the various themes.  I did not remember to point out that after the famous triple counterpoint towards the end, the Rules and Regulations theme is played to generate a little more excitement, before the big cadenza.  [Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan]

Frederic Loewe: Overture to My Fair Lady.  This would be hard to guess for a younger audience which hasn't heard the tunes from the musical or movie ad nauseam.  You should be able to identify: "You did it", "On the street where you live", "Wouldn't it be loverly", and a couple more.  [Andre Previn]

Part D (28 minutes)

Wagner: Overture to Tannhauser.  This opens with the Pilgrim's Chorus (horns and trombones, later with strings joining in), then after the Pilgrims go off into the distance, we hear the seductive music of Venusburg, and Venus herself, represented by the clarinet.  Our hero enters and sings a paean of praise to the goddess, and just as things are getting out of hand, the Pilgrims are heard returning, this time joined by a huge marching band they have linked up with somewhere.  (Believe it or not, the Pilgrim's Chorus is the very first tune I tried to harmonize by myself.  It turned out mostly pretty close to the original, but I later heard some really amazing chromatic details I had missed as a 13-year-old.)  [Festival Orchestra of London]

Hammerstein: Overture to The Sound of Music.  This was puzzle for you to guess.  The overture leads straight into the Nun's Chorus.  [Original Soundtrack Recording (Irwin Kostal?)]

Wagner: Prelude to Tristan and Isolde.  This sad story ends with the suicide of the young lovers.  The movie of a couple of years ago captures the mood very well.  [RSO, Ljublana]
 
Bernstein: Overture to Candide.  [New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein]

Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture.  This version has a full chorus singing the first theme, which is a hymn.  This is a later addition (see here) by Igor Buketoff.  The Russian Orthodox hymn is to the words "O Lord save Thy People".  [Gothenberg Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Jarvi]

Archie

Apologies: WXPI was off the air

The station engineers are tinkering with the transmitter, and the station has been off the air for close to a week.

I'm going to leave Saturday's show on the system for next weekend; there's no point putting something new on if the one in the queue hasn't aired!

General News
Omissions.  As you can see, some notable items are missing from the shows; for instance, there are tons of duets that you might have been looking for, but did not hear on that show.  I recently discovered an entire disc of duets by Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna.  There is an article about the lovely opera star, talking about her breakup with Mr Alagna, which you might be interested in.  I don't listen to a lot of Italian opera, so I will find it difficult to select a duet or two to play on the program.  The pop duets available are numerous, and I will try and find some for you on another show!

Overtures, too, are numerous; classical music fans all have their favorites, and might not find all of them on next Saturday's show!  The same with the Variations; the Enigma Variations were conspicuous by their absence.  I will try to squeeze them in.  Also, I want to present a set of variations of the sort: What if Mozart wrote "Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas"?  I don't know where to look for those sorts of things!!

Running a Radio Station.  All I really know is how my particular show is run!

There is a computer in the station, with an enormous hard disc, and a clock-driven program that runs continuously.  Like an alarm you might have running on your own computer or on your smart phone, the station program is designed to play music from a particular folder at a particular time.  That's mainly it.

At particular times, too: roughly every 30 minutes, according to FCC (radio) rules, the program is instructed to play a station identification, which sits in a particular folder.  At these times, brief service messages (Public Service Announcements, or PSA's) are played, to take up a total of two minutes, for announcements and identification.  The messages played on the hour are a little more formal than those played at the half-hour.

For some programs, the show host sits right in the studio at the microphone, and plays music he has got ready as MP3s, or conducts an interview, or anything he likes.  These are live shows.  In these sorts of cases, the show host is in charge of the mid-hour interruptions.

For other programs, the show host sends in (by mail, by Internet, or by actually coming into the studio and uploading it) two 28-minute MP3s.  That leaves 2 minutes for the station messages at the half-hour and the hour.  This is called a Podcast, and they tried to get me to do this.  Unfortunately, when this plays over a car radio, for instance, no information is displayed except the name of the program.

For yet other programs, like ours, all the music files are loaded into the computer, with a playlist, which is just a text file with the music files listed carefully in order.  When the Station program plays this playlist, your car radios (and some home stereos) have the ability to display: the Title, the Performer, the Album, and some other information.  I like that, because I don't always announce the performer, but I make sure that the performer is listed on this extra information, which is called metadata.  If I tire of providing all that, I can go into a podcast format, where the extra information is not broadcasted.  I have to organize the playlist so that the music playtime adds up to four groups of 28 minutes (plus a couple of seconds, possibly), so that the program can splice in the station messages every half hour.

Finally, if there are slots where local programming is not available, the Station program is instructed to splice in a program from somewhere else.  These are called syndicated programs, which are selected by a sort of committee at our radio station.  We only air syndicated shows that are free; commercial stations have to pay for their syndicated shows, and NPR stations have to pay for their shows as well.

The broadcast stream.  The signal from the station goes via a trunk Internet line to a computer sitting at the foot of the transmitting tower, where it sends the signal (and a power cable) up the tower to the transmitter.  Ours is a tiny 1 Kilowatt transmitter, which only transmits at about 50% capacity, because it is old, and the connections are corroded, and there is a lot of power loss.  The station is in a constant battle to get a more powerful transmitter, and a higher location.  It so happens that a commercial station in Martha's Vineyard has just upgraded to a more modern transmitter, and we're trying to get their older transmitter for ourselves.  But we can't afford the extra juice it will need, and we don't have the resources to lug the transmitter here from Massachusetts!!!  Everybody at our station is a volunteer, though some of them would dearly like to be paid a stipend.

We have an agreement with TuneIn Radio to carry our broadcasts live on the Internet.  If you click on this link right away, you're going to get an error message because we're off the air.  Within a day or two, however, clicking on the link above at 8:00 p.m. on a Saturday should get you our show live.

Ideas for Future Shows
Obviously, I have to keep a list of potential themes for future shows.
Children's Music.
Early Music.  This is music from before Baroque times, and even early Baroque.
Unusual Instruments, and Early Instruments.
Unusual performances of well-known music.  I do some of this already, but there's a lot more available.  Computer performance is a major subclass.
Opera.  We've heard a certain amount of opera, but a few snippets could be interesting.
Modern Music.  I'm going to be very selective here, and only feature very mainstream music from the 20^th century and later.
Music with stories associated with it.
Modern Suites.  For instance, the Mother Goose suite of Modest Mussorgsky, and Pictures at an Exhibition.
World Music.  There are other programs on our station that are based on this theme, but it's a big world.
Folk Music.
New Age takes on classical music, in other words, fusion music, and crossover music.
[Added later:]
Sonatas for various instruments.
Death, suffering and Grieving.  I don't know about this; young listeners are often hostile to this sort of thing.  But a lot of music was written in troubled times, and it is useful to be familiar with works that are concerned with suffering, death and anguish, so that when you're in that mood, you know where to go.
Choral music.  Writing good choral music is very hard, and when you hear good choral music, it is amazing.  It might be an acquired taste, and if you've sung in a choir, you're halfway there.
Marches.  This is a more popular genre than anyone would think, ranging from military marches to songs and tunes that just happen to be written as marches.
Music for plucked string: guitars, banjos, mandolins, lutes, and harps.  And, of course, harpsichords.
Symphonies.  These are just large-scale works according to a certain pattern, or form.  We've already listened to a number of them.  The 19th and 20th centuries had a surfeit of them, but some of them are excellent, and worth getting familiar with.  Obviously I don't know all the good ones, but I'm happy to share the few that I do know.
Halloween!!  I'm going to try and get together a nice mix of music, but scary music is not very common at all, unfortunately.  Luckily for all of us, another theme in Halloween is humor and comedy, and that might be helpful.


If you have ideas, tell me about them!

Archie.

Show 113: Overtures

[Added on 2015/7/18:  This used to be called Show 13.  I've renumbered the shows, so that this one is Show113.  The July 4th show for this year will be numbered numbered Show201, and so on.  If you didn't figure this out yet, my first show aired the week of July 4th, 2014.]

Introduction   
This program did not air as scheduled.  We are performing a major overhaul of our system, and until that is completed, the station will be off the air.

When the program finally airs, it is going to consist of Overtures.

The modern meaning of the word is, of course, something that precedes something else, for instance the opening movement of an Opera, or Broadway show, or whatever.  This is how things started off; in the time of King Louis the 14^th of France, it was a ceremonial promenade during which the King would make his entrance, after which there would be an evening of Dance.  Of course, if new music had been written for the occasion, the Overture would be the opening movement of the set of dances.  According to Wikipedia, the French word Ouverture literally means opening.

Later on, during the time of Beethoven and after, an Overture began to be a single-movement work that had some literary foundation: a piece about a person, or a scene, or a story, or some such inspiration from outside the realm of pure music.

But first, we start with some famous overtures from Bach, Handel and Mozart.

Handel: Overture to The Watermusic
This is the overture to Handel’s famous Watermusic.  I’m taking the position that famous pieces of music are famous for a reason, so I’m trying to squeeze in as many well-known classics as I can.  Quite sincerely, if you start recognizing tunes from the classical repertoire as a result of listening to this program, I shall think I have succeeded.

Bach: Overture to the Orchestral Suite in C major
Bach wrote four grand suites for orchestra, to be played when he was a court musician at Weimar.  Weimar is a famous German town, where Liszt was a composer, as well as Wagner, and from where the Weimeraner breed of dog originates.  Anyway, this is the introduction to the first of these Suites, and is one of my favorite movements.

Handel: Overture to Messiah   
The Christmas Season is approaching, and Messiah is a favorite at holiday time.  This is the Overture to Messiah by Handel.

Mozart: Overture to The Marriage of Figaro
The Marriage of Figaro has this mad, racing overture that is instantly recognizable.  We’re told that Mozart dashed this off in a few minutes the day before opening night.  Can you imagine?  Furthermore, the overture has absolutely no relationship to the opera musically.  Nothing.  Not a single musical motif from the opera is present in it.  Still, it’s one of the most famous overtures ever written.

Mozart: Overture to the Magic Flute
You should know that the Magic Flute had a lot of references to the Freemasons, which was gaining strength as an organization that provided a home to those who wanted some relief from the overwhelming influence of the Catholic Church.  Mozart was a fringe member —or maybe a plain old member— of the Freemasons, certainly one of the most famous members, and there are lots of masonic themes in the music, which I am ignorant of, not being a Freemason myself.

Listen to those three great, crashing chords that begin the overture.  This overture is just amazingly beautifully written, especially the orchestration.

Beethoven: Fidelio Overture
Beethoven wrote an opera, which is regarded very highly by some, called Fidelio, about a woman who goes into prison to rescue her husband.  Apparently this opera was featured in the movie Eyes Wide Shut, which I have not seen.  Anyway, here is an excerpt from the overture to Fidelio, conducted by George Szell

Mendelssohn: Midsummer Night’s Dream
Felix Mendelssohn was interested in Shakespeare, as were lots of Germans and Austrians in the late 19th century, and he wrote Overtures to various Shakespeare plays.  He was also into fairies in a big way, and one of his best known overtures is the one to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Here it is, with the London Symphony, conducted by Claudio Abbado.  By the way, Claudio Abbado is said to be descended from a Moorish Prince, Abdul Abbad.  Obviously that has nothing to do with how good a conductor Mr Abbado was, which was really great.  Anyway, Mendelssohn’s fairy music is unsurpassed.  Judge for yourself.

Mendelssohn: Fingal’s Cave
Mendelssohn visited a famous tourist spot in Scotland, called Fingal’s Cave.  He wanted to celebrate the occasion by writing a short piece of music.  It was increasingly becoming common to call these sorts of pieces overtures, and I can’t think of why that particular term would be used, and I don’t have the energy to do an etymological exploration of it.  It confuses things a little bit, when a word is used in a new way.  This is called generalization, such as when you use the word Xerox to mean any sort of photocopier, and even photocopying, the verb.  These days with the Internet, people do this all the time, and they rejoice when they’ve succeeded in introducing a new usage of a word into common parlance.  I’m talking softly, because this is early morning, and people in our house are still asleep.  So here’s Fingal’s Cave Overture, by Felix Mendelssohn.
   
Brahms: Academic Festival
So now we know that, by the time Mendelssohn, Schubert and people of that generation were composing, the word Overture had come to mean the musical equivalent of a short story, or even a journal article.

Johannes Brahms had been awarded an honorary degree from (The University of) Breslau.  Brahms wrote an overture to be performed during the ceremony, and it was a jolly thing with lots of undergraduate (read: Drinking) songs from Germany and Austria, including a Latin song called gaudeamus igitur, which translates like this:

Let us drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die;
let us delight in the pretty girls, and let us praise our Alma Mater, a font of wisdom.

I mean, there are a lot of verses, but this is the short version.
I’m going to fade right into the rowdy ending part.  Gaudeamus Igitur is the last big tune in the brass.

Wagner: Overture to Die Meistersinger
We’ve already heard the Meistersinger Overture twice.  Some people call it a Potpourri overture.  You probably know what potpourri is: a mixture of dried flowers and sweet spices and herbs that you cook in a pot when your house is full of cooking odors.  A Potpourri overture is just a mix of songs from a Broadway musical or movie, and the phrase is intended to be a sort of put-down.  The Meistersingers overture certainly contains snippets of tunes from the opera, but it is super highly structured, and we know that the last several bars is an amazing combination of three of the themes played simultaneously, combined with counterpoint.  So here is a shortened version of the whole thing, just because I love this piece.

Mystery Overture
This one you have to guess.

Wagner: Tannhauser Overture
One of the first pieces of classical music I learned about is the Overture to Wagner’s opera Tannhauser.  This overture actually represents, in miniature, the plot of the opera.
First, we hear a softly approaching hymn, which is the song of the Pilgrims, the Pilgrim’s chorus; they’re on their way to Rome, or somewhere.  Then the scene shifts to the garden of Venus, which represents the temptations of our hero.  The hero enters, and begins a rhapsodic song to Venus, but then the pilgrims are heard in the distance, returning, and their chorus drowns out Venus, and our hero is saved.  Wagner was a rather simple fellow, who wrote complex music.  He was vilified, about the time of World War 2, because the Nazis loved Wagner’s music.  Today, we take the view that if we start a witch-hunt to posthumously persecute anybody who was an inspiration to the Nazis, it would never end.  There were lots of people who were associated with the Nazis: Wilhelm Furtwangler, Herbert von Karajan, Konrad Lorenz.  They liked the color brown.  So, what are we going to do, not wear brown?  I hate the Nazis, of that time and of this time, but I wear plenty of brown, so sue me.  Anyway, Wagner’s Tannhauser, and the Pilgrim’s Chorus, and I hope you love it as much as I do!

Mystery Overture No. 2   
Guess this one too.

Wagner: Prelude to Tristan and Isolde
The story of Tristram and Isolde in the legend of King Arthur is a tragedy.  A young knight is sent out to Ireland to bring a princess to marry King Mark of Cornwall.  But on the voyage back, the young knight, Tristan, falls in love with the princess.  The story ends with the young lovers drinking poison together.  The overture to Tristan and Isolde is just a brilliant piece of music by Wagner.  I’m just going to play you the opening few seconds, just to put you in a lousy mood for the end of the show!  But this is an important piece of music, and you might just find these bars fascinating.

Bernstein: Overture to Candide
The overture of Bernstein’s highly regarded comic opera, Candide.  (A theme from it was Dick Cavett’s theme music for his talk show in the eighties.)

Another Mystery Overture
Guess.