This week on “Picture Perfect,” spring into the new year with an hour of time travel adventures!
Look forward – and back – to selections from “The Time Machine” (1960) by Russell Garcia, “Time After Time” (1979) by Miklós Rózsa, “Somewhere in Time” (1980) by John Barry, and “Back to the Future” (1985) by Alan Silvestri.
It’s a time travel toddy for New Year’s, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
What better way to treat your New Year’s Day hangover than with a celebratory concert of bright Strauss waltzes and raucous galops?
The Classical Network presents its annual live broadcast of the New Year’s Day Concert from Vienna. This year, the Vienna Philharmonic is conducted by Daniel Barenboim.
Load up your ice pack, pour yourself a hair of the dog, and tune in for this New Year’s tradition, this morning at 11:00 EST. 2022 gets off to a fizzy start on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
The dishes are clean, the guests are on the road. At last, a little “me” time.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” pour yourself something medicinal, kick back in front of the tree, and prepare to get reacquainted with the insides of your eyelids. The recovery from Christmas begins with a playlist of British Light Music classics.
Take a load off, with vintage recordings of works by Albert Ketèlbey, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Sir Edward Elgar, Richard Addinsell, George Scott-Wood, Haydn Wood, Billy Mayerl, and Eric Coates.
There’s light at the end of the tunnel. The time draws nigh for “Distant Light,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
I was at Princeton Record Exchange the other day, when something surreal happened. I was down on my knees, flipping through the dollar bins on the floor of the classical section, when I espied a CD of music by the Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg. The spine indicated a couple of concertos I knew I didn’t have in my collection. But what I found momentarily disorienting was a label on the front of the jewel case that sported some very familiar scrawl.
Was this a CD from the WWFM library? At first, I thought so. It was only upon further reflection that the truth became clear. This CD belonged to my former colleague, Bliss Michelson.
I know I’ve mentioned it before, but Bliss and I had a long association, from the time he taught me the ropes at WWFM in Trenton-Princeton, in 1995, to only a few years ago, when we were both on-call hosts at WRTI in Philadelphia. Bliss died in March from complications of COVID-19.
At WWFM, we had these labels that we affixed to the jewel cases of the CDs in the station library, on which we indicated the date and time the individual contents were played. At some point, we transitioned to a spread sheet on the computer, but we kept up the stickers all the same.
For some of us, our programming was heavily supplemented by music from our collections. To help keep track, Bliss carried over the labeling system to his own records. Many was the time that I’d be going through the library only to alight upon an interesting CD I hadn’t noticed there before. Of course, it was one of Bliss’ discs, accidentally shelved. On those occasions, I would leave it on his desk with a post-it note.
Then and now, his scrawl is unmistakable. So someone must have sold at least some of his collection to Princeton Record Exchange. It would have been fairly recently, since the price tag bears the date of 11-21.
What I learned from Bliss is incalculable. In particular, he really expanded my knowledge of Nordic repertoire. We were both Sibelius fans, and Bliss was enormously proud of his Swedish heritage. It’s a strange coincidence to have made the discovery of this CD. Bliss continues to introduce me to new music, even from beyond the grave.
You too might be interested to give it a listen, because it’s a knockout. If you love Rachmaninoff, Atterberg’s Piano Concerto is a one-way ticket to Valhalla. The movements are posted separately, so let the playlist run.
How is it I never encountered this before? Thank you, Bliss!
On #GivingTuesday, if you’re in a position to do so, don’t forget to lend a helping hand to hardworking charitable groups and non-profit organizations, those that make a difference in your community, enhance the quality of life, and actually do some good in the world. They need your money more than Amazon does. We’ve all got too much stuff anyway.
I stumbled across this video from a few years back of me interviewing Carol Burden, executive director of Trenton Music Makers, at the WWFM studios. It was the station’s custom for a time to invite representatives of local non-profits to come in on this day and tell us a bit about what they do. In between, I would program musical selections appropriate for the occasion and for the season, such as Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, with its concluding hymn of gratitude and thanksgiving, and Alan Hovhaness’ Symphony No. 11, “All Men Are Brothers.”
Kind of ironic to note the station’s mission statement at the end, since so little of the programming has been local since the start of the pandemic.
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