“Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!”
Sir Edward Elgar prefaced the score to his Symphony No. 2 with that quotation, lifted from a poem by Shelley.
I hear you, Sir Edward.
We’ll have a chance to listen to the symphony, among other selections today, between noon and 4 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.
Looking for a little refreshment for your Monday afternoon? Drink deep from “Pliny’s Fountain.” Arthur Meulemans’ opulent tone poem could have made Ottorini Respighi weep with envy. It’s one of three rarely-heard highlights I’ll be presenting this afternoon, including a brassy symphony by Nikolai Myaskovsky and a melodically appealing string quartet by Reynaldo Hahn, a composer better known for his art songs. We’ll have those and much more, between 4 and 7 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.
IMAGE: Pliny’s doves at their refreshment
The Producers. Young Frankenstein. Willy Wonka.
So sorry to see you go, Gene. Thanks for the laughs, never without heart.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/movies/gene-wilder-dead.html?_r=0
Pure Imagination:
I had heard Behzad Ranjbaran’s lyrical Piano Concerto at a concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra several seasons past, but it did not prepare me for the beauty and opulence of his “Persian Trilogy.” It’s rare for a contemporary composer to demonstrate such fluency in working on a large, romantic canvas. If you enjoy the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Paul Dukas or Ottorino Respighi, I think you’ll really enjoy this.
I’ll be presenting two-thirds of the “Persian Trilogy” – “Seven Passages” and “Seemorgh” – this Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” alongside a work for flute and cello, “Folk Songs (Set No. 9),” by Reza Vali. That’s a lot of music for an hour, so I really had to butcher my script in the editing process. But it was worth it.
I hope you’ll join me for “Roses of Persia,” a bouquet of Persian polyphonic music. Hear it tonight at 10 p.m. EDT on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org (where webcasts of past shows are also archived).
Pictured: The mythical bird Seemorgh, from the Persian epic, the “Shanameh.” She raises the abandoned newborn Zaal as her own. When Zaal goes out into the world, he is given one of her feathers, with which he is able to summon her in times of crisis.
Back in March, I posted a link to an electric guitar concerto by Lauri Porra, the great-grandson of Jean Sibelius. Porra has since composed “Kohta,” a work for rapper, orchestra and omniwerk, which was given its premiere by the Finnish Radio Orchestra earlier this month.
You can check it out here:
http://areena.yle.fi/1-3672367
Porra is a bassist in the Finnish metal band Stratovarius.
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