Boa tarde!
As we have for the past several weekdays, we’ll be interspersing into our playlist a few works by Brazilian composers and on Brazilian themes, the better to satisfy your musical curiosity, since television coverage of the Olympic Games in Rio cleaves pretty closely to the arenas.
We’ll also observe the birthday anniversary of Reynaldo Hahn, a figure whose origins were in Venezuela, though he spent much of his creative life in Paris, where he became an exquisite composer of art songs (and the longtime companion of Marcel Proust). Sure, his songs turn up in recitals from time to time, and once in a while you’ll hear his delightful work for winds, harp and piano, “The Ball of Beatrice d’Este,” but we’ll actually get to enjoy his Piano Concerto.
It’s also the anniversary of the first performance in Leningrad, in 1942, of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, the so-called “Leningrad Symphony,” a work that so embodied the plight of a city under foreign siege that its citizens were both moved to tears and inspired to battle on. The Soviets blared the performance over loud speakers pointed away from the city and toward the German lines, knocking out the Nazi artillery beforehand to ensure the enemy could absorb the defiant work in all its bombastic glory.
I hope you’ll join me this afternoon on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org. I’ll be here in all my bombastic glory until 4:00 EDT.
