Programming a radio show around the weather is always a tricky proposition. Yesterday, I made the assertion that spring needs our help! Then what followed was a glorious day in the Philadelphia-Princeton area. It has been a crazy season so far, and though the temperatures seem to be moderating for the next several days, we’ll be back down into the 60s (with rain) for Saturday, before sling-shotting into the upper 80s by the end of next week. Is it my imagination, or is “spring” getting shorter in this region? We seem to flip from winter, virtually into full summer, with a few, sporadic lovely days in between. Let’s face it, there are so few completely bearable days in a year. It’s amazing that man ever made it this far.
But I digress. I had better have some more caffeine before I pursue that line of thought any further, or I will never make it through the day.
Join me, won’t you, as we attempt to stabilize matters, with musical evocations of the season by Sir Arnold Bax, Wilhelm Peterson-Berger, Frank Bridge, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Claude Debussy, Zdeněk Fibich, Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Alexander Glazunov, Hermann Goetz, Joseph Marx, Darius Milhaud, Lodewijk Mortelmans, Joachim Raff, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Jean Sibelius, or as many of those as we can get to.
I can’t promise you won’t need a sweater or an umbrella, but I can promise you some truly gorgeous music. In particular, I hope you will stick around for a stunning performance of Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 (a.k.a. the “Spring Symphony”). It’s by a no-name orchestra (the Klassische Philharmonie Düsseldorf) – and a student one at that – but it’s a real corker! The timpanist sounds like he should be auditioning for “The Rite of Spring.”
In any case, the weather is always the same in my bunker deep beneath Bloomberg Hall on the campus of Princeton University. I hope you’ll join me, from 6 to 11 EDT, on WPRB 103.3 FM and at wprb.com. Every morning starts out steamy with an 80 percent chance of chaos, on Classic Ross Amico.
