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Tag: Mozart

WWFM Mozart Campaign Thanks & Figaro Sunday!

Thank you to all of you who contributed to yesterday’s Mozart campaign. It’s because of listeners just like you that we at WWFM are privileged to be able to do what we love to do – share great music with the community. And that community is huge! Yesterday, someone called in all the way from Nikiski, Alaska.

Unfortunately, we still came up considerably short of our projected goal, which means that we’ll have to come back and do it again sooner than we had hoped. If you had been meaning to contribute and did not have an opportunity to do so, you may still donate online at wwfm.org.

Tomorrow (Mozart’s actual birthday), the “Sunday Opera” will be devoted to a special presentation of “The Marriage of Figaro,” hosted by Michael Kownacky and David Osenberg. The performance, captured at the 1962 Glyndebourne Festival, will feature Heinz Blackenburg as Figaro and Mirella Freni as Susanna. Silvio Varviso will conduct. If you find you like it, the recording is still available as one of our thank you gifts. Search for it under the thank you gift drop-down box, when you make your online contribution.

There are also options to obtain all of the offered Mozart recordings as a bundle, with or without the handsome and durable WWFM tote bag.

Again, thank you for all that you do to help keep great music on the air on WWFM – The Classical Network.

As a token of my gratitude, please enjoy this duet from “The Magic Flute” rendered by actual birds:

January 26, 2019
Celebrate Mozart’s Birthday with Classical Music

There’s no art quite like MozArt.

Reacquaint yourself with the astonishing facility and pervasive humanity of Mozart’s music, as we observe his birthday today (he was born on January 27, 1756) with a full playlist of his symphonies, concertos, chamber and choral works, and selections from his music for the stage.

Yes, Mozart is good for you. Whether or not exposure to his output improves the development of babies’ brains, it has undoubtedly contributed to the world’s sentimental education. Mozart’s music is just plain good for the soul. It reassures and it keeps us in touch with the larger truths of what it means to be human. Was Mozart’s life a bed of roses? No. But he knew where to find beauty, and he devoted a substantial portion of his brief existence to shepherding it into the world.

We at The Classical Network understand the significance of keeping great music in our lives and in our community. But we can only do it with your help and with the help of listeners just like you. If you haven’t contributed to The Classical Network, or if you haven’t contributed recently – or if you HAVE contributed, but now feel you are in a position to bestow an additional gift – please consider joining us in membership today. We have four brand new Mozart-oriented thank you gifts to hopefully entice you and certainly to demonstrate our gratitude to you for doing your part to keep classical music on the airwaves and in continued good health.

There’s more to life than acquiring things, struggling to survive, or shouting down those who happen to disagree with us. The greatest truths and consolations are to be found in the finest music. You don’t have to “know” anything about it. All you to do is open yourself up to it and support it.

Please call us today (between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. EST) at 1-888-232-1212, or donate online (anytime) at wwfm.org. Then enjoy the music of Mozart right along with us, your friends, at WWFM – The Classical Network. Thank you for ALL that you do.

January 25, 2019
Victor Borge Birthday Comedy Classic Routines

On New Year’s Eve, I aired some selections from music-oriented comedy albums that seemed to be well-received by listeners. After all, who can’t use a good laugh on New Year’s? A hearty laugh is a kind of consolation and always good luck.

For Victor Borge’s birthday (Borge was born on this date in 1909), here’s “the unmelancholy Dane” with some of his classic routines.

A Mozart opera:

With Lauritz Melchior:

From an appearance on “The Dean Martin Show:”

Playing the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2:

Laughter must really be the best medicine. Borge lived until just a few days shy of his 91st birthday.

January 3, 2019
Berg, Mozart & Marlboro Zigzags on WWFM

There are times when I suspect Alban Berg felt he zigged when he should have zagged.

Berg, a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, was always the Romantic among serialists – one critic described him as “the Puccini of twelve-tone music” – so it’s not difficult to divine a shimmering, unresolved longing common to the works of his Viennese contemporaries.

On this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” we’ll hear Berg’s two-movement String Quartet of 1910. Like much of Berg’s music, the quartet is not really a strict adherent to any system. The music wafts spectrally, sharing tonal and atonal characteristics, a kind of fever dream of uncertainty.

There will be no lack of commitment in the performance, which dates from 1984. We’ll experience Marlboro excellence in the form of Ida Levin and Felix Galimir, violins; Benjamin Simon, viola; and Sara Sant’Ambrogio, cello.

Then we’ll emerge from the fin de siècle fog to find enlightenment with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart’s String Quintet No. 5 in D Major, K. 593, composed in 1790, adds a second viola to the mix. The work was recollected by the composer’s widow, Constanze, to have been written for a musical amateur, often speculated to be Johann Trost. Trost must have been quite the gifted dilettante. He also knew Haydn from Esterhaza, and Haydn dedicated some of his quartets to him.

When Haydn and Mozart played through the D Major Quintet together before Haydn’s first visit to London, the two men took turns indulging in the first viola part. The work was known for centuries as the “Zigzag” because of an alteration to the original manuscript that modified what had been a descending chromatic figure in the final movement into something decidedly more humorous.

We’ll hear a Marlboro performance from 2005, with Sarah Kapustin and Diana Cohen, violins; Mark Holloway and Sebastian Krunnies, violas; and David Soyer, cello.

The music may be jagged, but the path to enjoyment is always straight. It’s another hour of superb chamber music making from the legendary Marlboro Music Festival, this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

October 3, 2018
Salieri: More Than Mozart’s Rival?

He was a generous teacher, who fostered Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and even the son of the genius he was rumored to have poisoned.

His first act, when he was appointed Austrian Imperial Kapellmeister in 1788, was to revive Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” He was responsible for arranging first performances of his alleged nemesis’ Piano Concerto No. 22, the Clarinet Quintet, and the Symphony No. 40, and he had nothing but praise for “The Magic Flute.” He even took it upon himself to educate Franz Xaver Mozart, the composer’s son, who was born four months after his father’s alleged murder.

Already during the latter years of his life, Antonio Salieri’s enormous compositional output (37 operas, in addition to orchestral works, concertos, chamber music, and sacred pieces) gradually faded from public memory. Ironically, it is the scandalmongers who kept his name alive.

Rumors of Salieri’s involvement in Mozart’s death were codified by Alexander Pushkin in 1831 in the tragedy “Mozart and Salieri,” which appeared a few years after Salieri himself had passed. This was later set as an opera in 1898 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

Was this any way to treat such a generous, hard-working composer? While he was certainly no Mozart – who was? – his music is finely crafted and often quite enjoyable, certainly no worse than that of a majority of his contemporaries.

But, as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. In a way, Peter Schaffer’s “Amadeus” was the best thing to happen to Salieri in nearly 200 years. How many people remember Mozart’s quartet partners (with Haydn), Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and Jan Křtitel Vaňhal, both also talented and prolific composers?

By coincidence (?), Rimsky-Korsakov’s chamber opera is being performed today at Bard College, on the second half of a 1:30 p.m. program titled “Domestic Music Making in Russia,” as part of the 29th Annual Bard Music Festival: Rimsky-Korsakov and His World.

In another context, it would be a peculiar way to mark a composer’s birthday – but as I’m sure Dittersdorf and Vaňhal would agree, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Happy birthday, Antonio Salieri, Patron Saint of Mediocrity!

Russian film version of Rimsky’s “Mozart and Salieri” (without subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilw7oIkrDj4

In English, if a bit fuzzy:

Salieri’s Concerto for Flute, Oboe and Orchestra:

“I absolve you.”

August 18, 2018

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