This week on “Sweetness and Light,” the focus is on our friends to the north – all music associated, in one way or another, with Canada. We’ll hear works by Canadian composers Healey Willan and Robert Farnon, including Farnon’s “Ottawa” Symphony, with a few of his light music classics tossed into the bargain.
Neither Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek nor Ralph Vaughan Williams were Canadian, but both wrote music associated with the Great White North. Television audiences of the late 1950s would come to associate Reznicek’s best-known music with the North-West Mounted Police, during the time of the Klondike Gold Rush, when his “Donna Diana Overture” was appropriated as the theme for “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.” And what a performance we’ll hear, with Hermann Scherchen conducting, in a recording that was made contemporaneously with the run of the show!
Vaughan Williams wrote the music for the Powell-Pressburger film “49th Parallel,” in which patriotic Canadian citizens save our bacon from Nazi invasion. Raymond Massey beating the tar out of a Nazi? Now that’s the kind of propaganda I can get behind!
I’ll be ladling out the syrup and the pancakes will be fluffy, as we salute Canada on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
Stream it, wherever you are, at the link:
https://kwax.uoregon.edu/
Tag: Light Music
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A Canadian Pancake Breakfast on “Sweetness and Light”
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Insect Serenades on “Sweetness and Light”
This week on “Sweetness and Light,” celebrate the season of the cricket and the katydid! Put your legs together for an hour of insect “song.”
We’ll enjoy works by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Paul Lincke, Ernest Bucalossi, Dmitri Shostakovich, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Frank Loesser, Billy Mayerl, Frederic Cowen, and Fred L. Moreland.
Tune in for a wasps’ overture, a glow worm’s idyll, a grasshopper’s dance, a gadfly’s romance, a bumble-bee’s flight, an inchworm’s measure, some insect oddities, a butterfly’s ball, and a doodle-bugs’ parade.
We’ll be buzzing from the start on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
Stream it, wherever you are, at the link:
https://kwax.uoregon.edu/
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ILLUSTRATION: From “Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux,” by J.J. Grandville (1842) -
Keep Cool and Carry on with Refreshing Fountain Music on “Sweetness and Light”
In writing this, I am wondering if it’s more accurate to state that fountains burble or gurgle? This is the kind of heavy-lifting I do behind the scenes to make my light music shows seem so buoyant and effortless.
This week on “Sweetness and Light,” as I weigh the finer points, peering through the magnifying glass into my O.E.D., I hope to lessen your own burdens with a refreshing and restorative playlist for the hazy, lazy days of summer. Join me for an hour of “fountain” music by Robert Farnon, Franz Liszt, Maurice Ravel, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Hans Christian Lumbye, Arthur Meulemans, and Carl Bohm. For anyone flabbergasted by the omission of Respighi’s “Fountains of Rome,” fear not, the opulence of Meuleman’s “Pliny’s Fountain” will give old Ottorino a run for his money!
I may be a fount of indecision, but you can be certain of plenty of burbling or gurgling music on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
Stream it wherever you are at the link:
https://kwax.uoregon.edu/
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IMAGE: “Doves of Pliny” from Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli, after second century BCE mosaic by Sosus of Pergamon (reproduced many times)
FUN FACT! IMPRESS YOUR FRIENDS! Tivoli was also the location of the villa that inspired Liszt’s “Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este” (“The Fountains of the Villa d’Este”), also to be heard in this hour. -
Woodland Walks on “Sweetness and Light”
It’s well into May, the birds are singing, and the trees are vibrant and cheering (at least from where I type, in the Northern Hemisphere). All in all, the conditions are perfect for a musical walk in the woods this morning on “Sweetness and Light.”
We’ll visit the forests of Sherwood and Arden, respectively, courtesy of Frederic Curzon’s “Robin Hood Suite” and William Walton’s music for a 1936 film version of “As You Like It.” In between, we’ll enjoy a trip to the Vienna woods with Johann Strauss II and explore the lush forests of Lithuania with Mikalojus Čiurlionis. We’ll even partake in a woodland revel courtesy of George Melachrino, oh my!
No need to put on a hat or tuck your pants into heavy socks. The ticks and snakes will be most amicable on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 EDT, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
Stream it, wherever you are, at the link:
https://kwax.uoregon.edu/——-
PAINTING: “A Walk in the Forest” (1869) by Ivan Shiskin
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April in Paris on “Sweetness and Light”
This Saturday morning on “Sweetness and Light,” it’s April in Paris.
We’ll hear April-and-Paris themed songs by Charles Trenet (“En avril, à Paris”), Georges Bizet (“Chanson d’avril”) and, of course, Vernon Duke (“April in Paris”), alongside a symphony for wind instruments by Charles Gounod (first performed in Paris in April 1885), a love song by Erik Satie, a suite (“Paris”) by British light music master Haydn Wood, and a work by Darius Milhaud as good as spring itself.
It will be an hour of cafés and croissants, blossoms and bisous, on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
Stream it, wherever you are, at the link:
https://kwax.uoregon.edu/
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