Classic Ross Amico

Tag: WWFM

Presidents Day Classical Music Broadcast

It’s Presidents’ Day. Hopefully you hit the white sales early, so that you can sit back and enjoy the music. We’ll have works inspired by Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Chester A. Arthur, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and of course Washington and Lincoln. I’ll be practicing arithmetic on the back of a coal shovel and hurling silver dollars across the Potomac, from 4 to 7 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org

February 19, 2018
Classical Music Birthdays & Listener Appreciation

Unusually for me, I’ll have the conn this Thursday afternoon on The Classical Network. And what an assortment of birthdays to observe! Georges Auric, Jean Langlais, Michael Praetorius, Robert Fuchs, Friedrich Ernst Fesca, John Adams, Christopher Rouse, and Harold Arlen. Of course I’ll have a few other surprises along the way.

Where else are you going to find an afternoon playlist made up of music by these composers? Remember, it’s all made possible because of listeners just like you.

It’s Sustaining Member Appreciation Week at The Classical Network. I hope you will consider making a monthly commitment to the station in the form of an automatic charge to your credit card or bank account for whatever amount you decide. It could be $5, $10, $20 – you fix the amount. The donation will continue, once a month, until you tell us to stop. This will save us paperwork, it will save us man hours, and it will save us from losing revenue during the period after which a traditional, yearly membership will have lapsed. You can cancel or change your sustaining membership at any time.

We also encourage those of you who are already sustaining members to consider bumping up to the next level. If you’re already committed to $5 a month, do you think you can bump it up to $10? I mean, you’ll be abstaining from something during Lent anyway. Think about it – for the price of a doughnut and a coffee, you could double a $5-a-month investment in The Classical Network. You’d be strengthening the classical music service you love – and it’s a lot less fattening (Shatner).

Call us now at 1-888-232-1212, or visit our website at wwfm.org and click on the “We love our Sustaining Members” link at the top of the page, or the Valentine over to the right.

Thank you to all of you who have kept us strong over the past 35 years. I hope you’ll join me today – as a sustaining member – for another stimulating and uplifting playlist, from 4 to 7 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

February 15, 2018
Unrequited Love at Marlboro Music Festival

Few torments are as unshakeable as that of unrequited love. Yet sublimated passion has led to more than its share of artistic masterpieces. For this Valentine’s Day, we’ll enjoy the fruits of others’ longing, on this week’s “Music for Marlboro.”

It’s been speculated that Johannes Brahms’ “Liebeslieder Waltzes” was the product of his frustrated affection for Clara Schumann, the wife of composer Robert Schumann. The dance-like settings for four voices and piano (four hands) are based on love songs from Georg Friedrich Daumer’s collection “Polydora.”

We’ll hear a performance from the 1971 Marlboro Music Festival, featuring soprano Kathryn Bouleyn, mezzo-soprano Mary Burgess, tenor Seth McCoy, and baritone John Magnuson, with Rudolf Serkin and Luis Batlle at the keyboard.

The remarkably prolific Indian summer of Czech master Leoš Janáček can attributed in part to the sublimated passion he felt for Kamila Stösslová, a married woman some 38 years his junior. Janacek’s String Quartet No. 2, composed in 1928, when the composer was about 74 years-old, was inspired by their long and intimate – though unconsummated – relationship, detailed in their more than 700 letters. The work has been described as a “manifesto on love.”

We’ll hear Janáček’s “Intimate Letters,” performed at the 2002 Marlboro Festival by violinists Nicholas Kendall and Hiroko Yajima, violist Richard O’Neill, and cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach.

Great composers’ romantic frustrations are our gain this week, on “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

Top (left to right): Janáček and his muse; bottom: Brahms, not yet “free but happy”

February 14, 2018
Fat Tuesday Carnival Music & Sustaining Members

Fat Tuesday! Time to stuff ourselves with doughnuts and alcohol, and to carry on with mad abandon. Tomorrow the streets will be strewn with bottles and bodies, and Lent will be upon us.

Get ready to live hard, this afternoon on The Classical Network, as we present music appropriate for the day, with a veritable orgy of carnivals, dances, and masked balls, and ample depictions of beloved characters of the commedia dell’arte.

We’ll hear Edward Joseph Collins’ “Mardi Gras,” Hershy Kay’s arrangements of music by New Orleans-born pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk into the ballet “Cakewalk,” Robert Schumann’s “Faschingsschwank aus Wien” (“Carnival Jest from Vienna”), and Igor Stravinsky’s ballet “Petrouchka,” about love and jealousy among puppets at the Shrovetide Fair.

This level of intensity can only be sustained for so long. On the other hand, a sustaining membership to The Classical Network could go on in perpetuity.

This week is Sustaining Member Appreciation Week at The Classical Network. I hope you will consider making a monthly commitment to the station in the form of automatic withdrawals from your debit card, credit card, or bank account in whatever amount you decide. It could be $5, $10, $20 – you fix the amount. The donation will continue, once a month, until you tell us to stop. This will save us paperwork, it will save us man hours, and it will save us from losing revenue during the period after which a traditional, yearly membership will have lapsed. You can cancel or change your sustaining membership at any time.

We also encourage those of you who are already sustaining members to consider bumping up to the next level. If you’re already committed to $5 a month, do you think you can bump it up to $10? I mean, you’ll be abstaining from something during Lent anyway. Think about it – for the price of a doughnut and a coffee, you could double a $5-a-month investment in The Classical Network. You’d be strengthening the classical music service you love – and it’s a lot less fattening!

Call us now at 1-888-232-1212, or visit our website at wwfm.org and click on the “We love our Sustaining Members” link at the top of the page.

Thank you to all of you who have kept us strong over the past 35 years. I hope you’ll join me today – as a sustaining member – for a carnival blow-out, from 12 to 4 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

February 13, 2018
Lincoln Birthday Music WWFM

Coming up, it’s a musical celebration of our 16th president. Join me for music by Aaron Copland, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Roy Harris, Jennifer Higdon, Paul Turok, and John Williams, on this, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, between 5 and 7:00 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org

February 12, 2018

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