Classic Ross Amico

Tag: WPRB

Academic Music on WPRB Radio

Okay, BMOC. How much do you really know about “academic” music? Time to hit the books on WPRB.

We’ll have selections to put you in the mindset of school and study this morning, including symphonies inspired by Cambridge (Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry), Texas Christian University (Don Gillis), Charterhouse (Ralph Vaughan Williams), and a finger-wagging schoolmaster (Franz Joseph Haydn). There will also be a march for the Yale-Princeton Football Game by Charles Ives and episodes of inappropriate hard drinking at graduation with Johannes Brahms and Hugo Alfven.

For extra credit, tune in for test pieces written for student musicians, music performed by university ensembles, and possibly even a few etudes (literally “studies”).

Remember, there will be plenty of time to sleep in class, so join me this Thursday morning from 6 to 11 EDT, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. It’s a perpetual school of hard knocks, on Classic Ross Amico.

September 7, 2017
School Days Classical Music on WPRB

Ah, school days! Time again to flagpole sit, stuff phone booths and swallow goldfish, all in the name of higher (and lower) education.

Join me this Thursday morning on WPRB, as we turn our thoughts to academic pursuits. We’ll have symphonies inspired by Cambridge (Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry), Texas Christian University (Don Gillis), Charterhouse (Ralph Vaughan Williams), and a finger-wagging schoolmaster (Franz Joseph Haydn). There will also be a march for the Yale-Princeton Football Game by Charles Ives, and episodes of hard drinking at graduation with Johannes Brahms and Hugo Alfven.

Join me in reassembling the dean’s car in his living room, this Thursday morning from 6 to 11 EDT, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. It will be seven years of college down the drain, on Classic Ross Amico.

September 6, 2017
Labor Day American Music Celebration

Labor Day is many things to many people. Officially, it is a federal holiday, a celebration of the worker. Unofficially, it holds connotations of the end of summer, a last chance to hit the road and enjoy the beach, have family and friends over for a picnic, or simply kick back for three days and deny the impending, precipitous dash through the autumn and winter holidays. For us, it’s an excuse to flood the air waves with American music.

Join me this Thursday morning on WPRB, as we celebrate the American landscape, with music about natural and man-made wonders. We’ll conjure up the dungareed laborer, with the sounds of rivets and factory whistles. We’ll take a last dance around the firehouse and the gazebo. We’ll even enjoy some musical picnic foods. Plenty of the music will be wondrous in itself.

Put aside thoughts about punching the clock or punching your supervisor, this Thursday morning from 6 to 11 EDT, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. Hard times come again no more, on Classic Ross Amico.

August 31, 2017
Labor Day Weekend: American Music on WPRB

As we approach the Labor Day weekend, get ready for a real labor of love, this Thursday morning on WPRB. It will be an all-American program. Man-made and natural wonders will punctuate the show, with works like Tobias Picker’s “Keys to the City” (written to mark the 100th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge), Samuel Jones’ Symphony No. 3 (a musical response to Texas’ Palo Duro Canyon), and Joan Tower’s “Made in America.”

In addition, there will be lighter pieces about picnic foods and gazebo dances. I’ll also play a little musical ketchup – I mean catch-up – as I finally get around to airing at least two works promised on earlier shows that were bumped due to time constraints: Elie Siegmeister’s “Sunday in Brooklyn,” with its celebratory final movement inspired by Coney Island, and Ned Rorem’s Symphony No. 3, in a recording of its world premiere, with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic.

As if all that weren’t enough, we’ll enjoy a recent recording of the Sonata for Piano by Jack Gallagher (composer), newly released by Centaur Records, Inc.

Put away your hard hat and lunch pail and join me for one final helping of baked beans and corn-on-the-cob, this Thursday morning from 6 to 11 EDT, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. Next week it will be back to the mines with you, on Classic Ross Amico.

August 30, 2017
Bernstein’s Ecstasy Aired on WPRB

Making music threw Leonard Bernstein into ecstasies. And he wasn’t ashamed to let you know it.

Join me this Thursday morning on WPRB as we anticipate the 99th anniversary of Bernstein’s birth (on August 25, 1918) with highly charged performances of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 4 and Jean Sibelius’ “Pohjola’s Daughter,” alongside Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat major, with Bernstein at the keyboard, playing with joyful abandon.

Along the way, we’ll salute The American Boychoir, the Princeton-based organization that closed its doors on August 15th after 79 years, with a recording of Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms.” Bernstein’s last major work, “Arias and Barcarolles,” will be heard in its original (and better) version for mezzo-soprano, baritone and piano four hands. The world premiere recording features Judy Kaye and William Sharp, the latter no stranger to Princeton audiences, thanks to frequent guest appearances singing Bach with The Dryden Ensemble. We’ll also appreciate the talent of the late Barbara Cook with selections from “Candide.”

In addition, there will be some real rarities along the way (Nikolai Lopatnikoff’s Concertino for Orchestra, David Diamond’s Symphony No. 4). We’ll hear Bernstein the conductor, the pianist and the chamber musician, the composer of concert works and musical theater pieces.

Celebrate the genius of this musical hydra, this Thursday morning from 6 to 11 EDT, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. Lenny goes for broke, on Classic Ross Amico.

August 24, 2017

Tag Cloud

RECENT POSTS