So it’s November 1st. All Saints’ Day. Something is seriously wrong with my schedule when I am too busy to write about my favorite day of the year, which is Hallowe’en. Even worse, I couldn’t take any portion of the day simply to relax in front of the television set with Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price or Christopher Lee. I shake my fist at the heavens in impotent rage.
Ah well. I will hope for a more relaxed schedule next year. For now, allow me to thank all of you who supported the station during its recent membership campaign. The station did very good business this week, and we met the challenge that was posed during my “pre-game” show on Wednesday (before the rebroadcast of “The Lost Chord” at 6), so thanks again. I don’t know that it will get me any of my regular shifts back, but thank you all the same.
Speaking of “The Lost Chord,” I hope you will pardon me if I take this opportunity to tell you a few things about this week’s program. My thesis will be autumn in the North countries, as well as in the Nordic soul – which is another way of saying, we’ll hear two works that deal with natural and metaphorical autumn.
First we’ll have the Symphony No. 4, subtitled “Fall of the Leaf,” composed in 1916, by the Danish composer Rued Langgaard (he of the impossible-to-pronounce name). Langgaard, an eccentric and an outcast, bucked every trend in Danish music, so that it took well over a decade after his death in 1952, at the age of 59, for his works to begin to gain traction. A number of the symphony’s sections bear descriptive subtitles, such as “Rustle in the Forest;” “Glimpse of Sun;” “Thunderstorm;” “Autumnal;” “Tired;” “Despair;” “Sunday Morning (The Bells);” and “At an End.” Don’t expect sonata-allegro form!
Then we’ll have a three-movement tone painting by Einojuhani Rautavaara, the grand old man of Finnish music, his “Autumn Gardens,” from 1999. The work is characterized by plenty of late-period Rautavaara lyricism and luminosity. If you enjoy the music of Sibelius and Vaughan Williams, don’t miss it!
That’s “Fall of the Leif” – autumnal meditations from the North. You can hear it this Sunday night at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or listen to it later as a webcast, at http://www.wwfm.org.
PHOTO: The Leifs certainly are lovely this time of year
