With the Fourth of July still six days away, I was trying to come up with a way to honor some aspect of the country’s rich musical heritage – it is, after all, the last weekend before the holiday – but I didn’t want to start clobbering everybody with Sousa marches just yet.
I found my solution on Broadway: both of my specialty shows today are connected in some way or another to classic American musical theater.
The playlist on “Sweetness and Light,” the light music show, is constructed on works that were actually staged on the Great White Way, including Eubie Blake & Noble Sissle’s “Shuffle Along” (the 1921 all-Black musical that spawned the breakout hit “I’m Just Wild about Harry”), Leonard Bernstein’s “On the Town” (the ballet music, before it was distilled into the familiar “Three Dance Episodes,” with a 24-year-old Bernstein conducting), George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” (conceived by the composer as an opera, but produced on Broadway several times over the decades before finally being elevated to the pantheon), and Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart’s “On Your Toes” (the climactic “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” sequence, which we’ll enjoy on Rodgers’ birthday).
We’ll get your toes tapping, for the most part, but also include a grand piano fantasy on themes from “Porgy” by Earl Wild.
It’s showtime, this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT.
Then later, on “The Lost Chord,” a program that revives unusual and neglected repertoire, we’ll come at the same source from a different perspective, as we’ll hear concert works by composers of notable Broadway hits.
Vladimir Dukelsky was born in what is now Belarus, but when he settled in the United States, his friend, George Gershwin suggested a name change. Thereafter, he was known as Vernon Duke. As Duke, he composed such standards as “April in Paris” and “Autumn in New York,” and he had a hit show in “Cabin in the Sky.”
As Dukelsky, he had works championed by Serge Koussevitzky and choreographed by Léonide Massine and George Balanchine. We’ll hear a Piano Concerto he composed at the age of 19 at the request of Arthur Rubinstein.
Meredith Willson is best-known for his Broadway smashes “The Music Man” and “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” but he emerged from the classical music world, as a flutist who played with John Philip Sousa and the New York Philharmonic. We’ll hear Willson’s Symphony No. 2, subtitled “The Missions of California.”
I hope you’ll join me in giving my regards to Broadway with “Broadway Lights” on “Sweetness and Light” (at 11:00 a.m. EDT/8:00 a.m. PDT), and “Broad Talents from Broadway” on “The Lost Chord” (at 7:00 p.m. EDT/4:00 p.m. PDT), both of them on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link:
IMAGES: “Shuffle Along” sheet music and (top to bottom) Sissle & Blake, Rodgers & Hart, and Meredith & Rini Willson
