I guarantee, if you grew up with Warner Bros. cartoons, you have a least some familiarity with the more popular overtures of Franz von Suppé. But are they popular anymore? I mean, with the diminishment of classical music radio stations and what was once classified in the industry as morning and afternoon drive (peak rush hour day parts)?

Nothing fit the bill for a workday commute like a Suppé overture. The tunes are buoyant and memorable, the rhythms and tempi exhilarating (even when you’re stuck in traffic), the duration brief (perfect for advertisers). The “Light Cavalry Overture.” “Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna.” “Poet and Peasant.” It never even occurred to most that a lot of these were connected to larger works. Operettas mostly. Suppé composed four dozen of them!

He also wrote music in forms you might find surprising. Symphonies, masses, an oratorio. When was the last time anyone heard those?

This weekend, the Wayne Oratorio Society of Wayne, PA, will be offering up a veritable tureen of Suppé at his most uncharacteristic – some of his sacred music! – as the society revives his rarely-heard Requiem of 1855, billed as its first performances ever in the United States. The work was resurrected in the U.K. for the first time in more than eight decades only in 1984.

Suppé’s Requiem will be performed twice, on concerts given at Wayne Presbyterian Church, 125 E. Lancaster Ave., in Wayne, this Saturday and Sunday at 7 p.m.

Also on the program will be one of Brahms’ loveliest choral creations, “Nänie,” after Schiller’s famous poem, a meditation on the transience of all things. It begins “Even beauty must die.” Well, not as long as this work endures!

The concerts are free, but you’d be doing the right thing by dropping a donation in the box. I guarantee it will be worth it. Their Vaughan Williams’ “A Sea Symphony” a few seasons back was a knockout! For more information, visit waynepres.org.

Suppé’s Requiem, unsurprisingly, is of quite a different character from “Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna,” especially as conducted by Bugs!

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