It may be a week before Easter, but this Sunday morning on WPRB we’ll be going as mad as a March hare. It’s our second annual salute to March Madness!
That’s right – it will be an all-march morning. Marches for band. Symphonic marches. Marches for piano. Light music marches. Military marches. Funeral marches. Coronation marches. Circus marches. We’ll even have a symphony written for West Point that incorporates a marching machine.
How could we possibly sustain this over a span of three hours? Well, if we could do it last year for five hours, we can do it this year for three. We’ll be propelled by a variety of moods and timbres, with a couple of larger works (such as Joachim Raff’s Piano Concerto, with its march-like finale), to break free of obsessive 4/4 time.
We’ll have a chance to rest our legs at 9:00, when I’m joined by violinist Dan Zhu. Zhu will appear with the Bravura Philharmonic Orchestra tonight at 7:30 p.m. at Richardson Auditorium on the campus of Princeton University. He’ll be the soloist in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and then a traditional Chinese piece, “Morning at Miao Ling Mountain.” The program will conclude with music director Chiu-Tze Lin conducting Brahms’ Symphony No. 1. You can find out more at bravuraphil.org. We’ll ask Zhu to talk about his career, his love of music, and his passion for environmental advocacy. Zhu was the first violinist to perform in Antarctica, in 2013.
The rest of the morning will consist of mad marches. It’s the ultimate Face-Palm Sunday, from 7 to 10 EDT, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. We’ve been given our marching orders, on Classic Ross Amico.
