“Is it the words that move my heart or the music that speaks more strongly? It’s fruitless to try to separate them. Words and music are fused into one… One art redeemed by the other!”
– The Countess, Richard Strauss’ “Capriccio”
I hope you’ll join me this morning on WPRB, when and where there will be plenty of words and music to ponder, as we listen to as much music inspired by poetry and poets as we possibly can in five hours.
It will be a veritable Norton Anthology of works influenced by Matthew Arnold, William Blake, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, E.E. Cummings, A.E. Houseman, Victor Hugo, Ben Johnson, Edward Lear, Federico Garcia Lorca, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pushkin, Friedrich Schiller, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Wallace Stevens and William Butler Yeats.
You’ll hear choral music, song, overtures and symphonic poems, with Sir John Gielgud reading the texts by Aloysius Bertrand that inspired Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit.”
J.D. Burnett, founder and artistic director of the Kinnara Ensemble, will drop by at around 10:00. He’ll tell us a little bit about the choir’s concert at The Hun School of Princeton this Saturday at 8 p.m., when the group will present Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Serenade to Music,” along with works by Johannes Brahms and others.
Sharpen your quills – it’s all about poetry and music this morning, from 6 to 11 ET, at WPRB 103.3 FM or online at wprb.com. We’re starving for our art on Classic Ross Amico.