Today is the 120th anniversary of the birth of contralto Marian Anderson. Violinist Gidon Kremer turns 70. We’ll have music inspired by Arthur’s legendary sword, Excalibur, by Louis Coerne, and Morten Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna.” You can also look forward to “An English Suite,” courtesy of Hubert Parry, and a work by the Swedish composer Wilhelm Peterson-Berger. All in all, it’s a great afternoon for programming by birthday anniversaries today, from 4 to 7 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.
Tag: Marian Anderson
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MLK Day Hear Inspiring Black Composers on WWFM
Martin Luther King Day.
Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Schwantner’s “New Morning for the World (Daybreak of Freedom),” on a text drawn from King’s speeches, still not available on CD? In this fine recording? Why?
Hear it today, on glorious vinyl, alongside music rendered by pioneering African-American composers and performers, including Marian Anderson, Harry T. Burleigh, Natalie Hinderas, Florence Price, William Grant Still and George Walker, from 4 to 7 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.
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Music Color & Expectations
Does the color of one’s skin have any bearing on the kind of music one writes? Should a black composer be expected to incorporate jazz or spiritual inflections into his or her music?
Tune in tomorrow morning to have lazy expectations confounded. We’ll have representatives of the jazzy and spiritual schools, of course, but we’ll also hear works by a Pulitzer Prize winner who makes his home in New Jersey, an Afro-Cuban master of the guitar, a musketeer in the service of Louis XVI, and an Englishman infatuated with the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Clipper Erickson, piano of Westminster Conservatory of Music will drop by at around 10:00 to talk a bit about R. Nathaniel Dett, the grandson of fugitive slaves, who went on to become an important voice in American music. Erickson’s album of Dett’s complete piano works, “My Cup Runneth Over,” has recently been issued on the Navona Records label.
In addition, we’ll hear recordings of the late conductor Paul Freeman, some spirituals sung by Marian Anderson, and the cantata “Done Made My Vow” by Adolphus Hailstork, in a recording made by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
In advance of MLK Day, it’s an exploration of content, character and color, with music by composers of African descent, tomorrow morning from 6 to 11 ET, on WPRB 103.3 FM or at wprb.com. Music is King, on Classic Ross Amico.
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Marian Anderson’s Historic Met Debut
Philadelphia-born contralto Marian Anderson, famously lauded by Arturo Toscanini as having “a voice such as one hears once in a hundred years,” made her belated Metropolitan Opera debut on this date 60 years ago – January 7, 1955.
She was the first African American to be so permitted. Why anyone would keep so talented an individual from singing on any stage anywhere on account of her skin color defies comprehension. What were people thinking?
It’s great that she sang Ulrica and all, and I’m sure she was marvelous, if getting on in years (she was a month shy of her 58th birthday), but there’s always something about the stills that make me a little uncomfortable, as if they were trying to portray her as some sort of voodoo priestess, like she was Screamin’ Jay Hawkins or something.
Here’s a sample of Anderson as Ulrica: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTUfEcTRzIY
Give that woman a drink from the Ezio Pinza fountain!
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