Once more unto the breach, dear friends!
With two weeks left in our four-part celebration of William Shakespeare this month, we’ve still got a lot of ground to cover. In case you haven’t heard, April 23 marks the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death. (It’s also traditionally held to be the date of his birth, 52 years earlier.) Every Thursday morning on WPRB, we’re listening to music inspired by Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets.
In the remaining hours, I am hoping to get to the following composers and works: Geoffrey Bush’s “Yorick,” Cecil Coles’ “Comedy of Errors Overture,” David Diamond’s “Music for Romeo and Juliet,” Gerald Finzi’s “Let Us Garlands Bring,” Josef Bohuslav Foerster’s “From Shakespeare,” Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” Florent Schmitt’s “Antony and Cleopatra” (in a recent recording with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta), Jean Sibelius’ “The Tempest,” Bedrich Smetana’s “Richard III,” Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Serenade to Music” (on a text from “The Merchant of Venice”), Sir William Walton’s “Macbeth,” and Alexander Zemlinsky’s “Cymbeline,” among others.
In this week of the Pulitzer Prizes, we’ll also hear Paul Moravec’s “Tempest Fantasy,” the 2004 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
With only ten hours to go, can I possibly program all of these, with additional surprises? Where there’s a Will, there’s a way! Maybe I’m a utopianist, but I sure will try. I have no idea if and when any of them will be played, so you will just have to tune in whenever you can, for as long as you can.
I’ll also welcome two guests tomorrow: Mariusz Smolij, music director of the Riverside Symphonia, will tell us about his orchestra’s Friday night concert at St. Martin of Tours Church in New Hope – he’ll talk to us a little after 8 a.m. – and William Walker from The Princeton Singers will drop by a little after 9 to tell us about their Shakespeare-inspired concerts at Princeton University Art Museum on Saturday evening.
We’re buried by the Bard, Thursday mornings in April, from 6 to 11 EDT, on WPRB 103.3 FM and at wprb.com. We’re all shook up for Shakespeare, on Classic Ross Amico.
PHOTO: Funerary monument, carved by Gerard Johnson, a Shakespeare contemporary, which overlooks Shakespeare’s grave at Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-upon-Avon.
The epitaph on the grave itself (attributed to Shakespeare):
Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
#Shakespeare400
