Bring down the hatboxes and polish up your shoes. It’s nearly time to take a stroll down the avenue!
I hope you’ll join me this morning on “Sweetness and Light” for a good old-fashioned Easter Parade. We’ll enjoy a veritable bouquet of graceful melodies, turned-out as boulevardiers, flirts, dandies, and dog walkers.
Gentlemen, tip your hats, and, ladies, model your bonnets, as we partake in a leisurely promenade on a lovely spring morning.
Start your day with a light music Easter Parade 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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It’s a Light Music Easter Parade on “Sweetness and Light”
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Feline Affection and Frivolity on “Sweetness and Light”
This week on “Sweetness and Light,” the cat’s out of the bag. It’s an hour of felicitous feline music!
On the 150th anniversary of the birth of American composer John Alden Carpenter, we’ll hear the ballet “Krazy Kat,” inspired by George Herriman’s cult comic strip. Carpenter characterized it as a “jazz pantomime”, but if there’s any jazz in it, it’s “white man” jazz of the 1920s (i.e. less jazz than “Rhapsody in Blue”). Believe it or not, I’ve actually seen this performed – twice! If memory serves, Sergei Prokofiev, in the U.S. for the debut of his opera “The Love for Three Oranges” and to perform his Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was present at the work’s premiere. I can’t find anything on the internet to back it up right now, so it looks like I’ll be sleuthing around my library.
Carpenter’s music will headline a meow mix of melodies by Leroy Anderson, Ernst von Dohnányi, Richard Rodney Bennett, Gioachino Rossini, Nino Rota, Samuel Barber, and Zez Confrey.
It will be programming you can sink your claws into, on “Sweetness and Light.” The music, like your host, will be the cat’s pajamas, this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
Stream it, wherever you are, at the link:
https://kwax.uoregon.edu/ -
Musical Confections for Valentine’s Day on “Sweetness and Light”
This morning on KWAX, it’s flowers and chocolate for breakfast. I’ll do my best to indulge your sweet tooth and lend a serotonin boost with a special Valentine’s Day sampler.
Luxuriate with an assortment of decadent Fritz Kreisler violin bonbons, a suite from Lord Berners’ ballet “Cupid and Psyche,” Victor Herbert’s orchestration of Franz Liszt’s “Liebestraum,” Henry Mancini’s arrangement of Nino Rota’s “Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet,” and some romantic reveries by Gilbert & Sillivan, Charles Ancliffe, and Leonard Bernstein.
Better limber up those lips. It will be an hour of musical confections for Valentine’s Day on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST. Hear it exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
Stream it, wherever you are, at the link:
https://kwax.uoregon.edu/ -
Northern Exposure on “Sweetness and Light”
This week on “Sweetness and Light,” it’s a program of lighter music from the northern countries.
We’ll give poor overworked Edvard Grieg a break, with Norway represented by Johan Halvorsen and the now lesser-known pianist-composer Agathe Backer Grøndahl, a pupil of Franz Liszt.
From Sweden, we’ll enjoy two versions of Hugo Alfvén’s evergreen “Swedish Rhapsody No. 1” – first, Mantovani’s popular hit from 1953, then with the composer himself conducting, from the very next year, in the first stereo recording ever made in Sweden.
Speaking of popular hits, we’ll also hear Arthur Fiedler’s bestselling recording of “Jalousie,” by Danish composer Jacob Gade (no relation to Niels Wilhelm Gade), from 1935. Fiedler remade it in stereo, but it’s my show, so I’m keeping it hardcore.
Also from Denmark, we’ll have a folk-music suite by Percy Grainger. Ah! But Grainger was not from the north, you say. He was born in Australia. Quite true. However, as an energetic pianist and composer of insatiable curiosity, he traveled seemingly everywhere, with a particular fondness for the Scandinavian countries. (His wife was Swedish.)
But if authentic Danish composers are more your thing, not to worry, we’ll round out the hour with a galop by Hans Christian Lumbye.
All eyes and ears face north this week on “Sweetness and Light.” I hope you’ll join me for this hour of northern “lights,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
Stream it wherever you are at the link:
https://kwax.uoregon.edu/ -
Celebrating Albert Ketèlbey Light Music Luminary
He helped bring “light” into the world.
This week on “Sweetness and Light,” we mark the sesquicentenary of the birth of Albert Ketèlbey.
Along with Eric Coates, 11 years his junior, Ketèlbey was one of the foremost British light music luminaries. In fact, it’s been said that at his peak, in the 1920s, there was no more successful composer in England. His music was played by palm court orchestras at grand hotels, at luxurious restaurants, in tea shops and cinemas, on municipal orchestra concerts, and on recordings and radio.
Nowadays, his music is much less frequently heard. Coates has his infectious marches and “By the Sleepy Lagoon,” while Ketèlbey often strays to exotic fairy lands, dabbling in a kind of “orientalism” that is now decidedly out-of-fashion – though for some reason, it doesn’t prevent us from enjoying works like Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.”
Even in his day, Ketèlbey withstood the brickbats of jealous rivals and indignant critics. It must have been doubly exasperating when he became England’s first composer to earn a million dollars. Unquestionably, there is a certain “kitsch” factor to his output. His works have been described as both “reprehensibly demeaning” and “delightfully tacky.” But there’s also an element of naiveté, which can still charm those of us lulled by a nostalgia for our grandparents’ enthusiasms.
And face it, he DID always have an ear for a good tune.
It’s unlikely in our more culturally sensitive age that Ketèlbey’s music will ever make a huge comeback, but these twee picture postcards offer fascinating glimpses into simpler times in the world of musical entertainment. I hope you are able to set aside your cynicism and sophistication for an hour, as we salute Albert Ketèlbey on the 150th anniversary of his birth, on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Stream it wherever you are at the link:
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