Eric Nauert from member station WSVH Savannah is your Midday Music host today; the playlist is here. Sarah Zaslaw will host on Monday, and Alan Cooke's requests edition of the show returns next week. Happy Labor Day weekend!
GPB provides classical music on the radio; we also support live performances in the communities we serve. Starting in September, check this blog often. In addition to Midday Music playlists I'll resume listing classical happenings around the state as concert series rev back up for the 2008-2009 season.
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Several Americans today on GPB. For the 90th birth anniversary of composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein today, the San Francisco String Quartet plays its version of Bernstein's "Gee Officer Krupke," from West Side Story. We hear Virgil Thomson's music for an arty film the government put out in 1937 to convince Americans of the need for dams on the Mississippi: The River. And from just last decade, by Christopher Theofanidis, sounds for string orchestra titled Visions and Miracles.
Other highlights include selections from Edvard Grieg's music for the drama Peer Gynt and the seldom-heard second suite of Caucasian Sketches by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, based on music of the Caucasus region (the area known as Georgia).
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We're going for more than eight golds on GPB's Midday Music.
In the Goldberg Variations, Bach presents a beautiful initial tune, riffs on its bass line in many ways and finally returns to the opening tune. We hear the Goldberg Variations (in Glenn Gould's 1955 recording) plus variations on them - from Bach's own canons on that same bassline, to Gabriela Montero's Goldberg-inspired improv, to a rag on mandolin, piano and tuba.
Also on this glittering show, there's gold from the River Rhine, a golden rooster of Russian lore, the golden spike that connected America's railroads, goldenrods, a golden age and a golden spinning wheel. Phelps, schmelps!
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Going for the silver! (Also, big pieces by Tchaikovsky and Schubert.)
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Olympic medal fever seizes Midday Music! In today's loose musical tie-ins we go for two bronzes (both equestrian, as it happens). Tomorrow: a nice handful of silvers. Thursday: aiming for more than eight golds.
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John Powell was many things: a Virginian-born composer, an international concert pianist, a collector of Appalachian old-time tunes, an amateur astronomer who discovered a comet, and a racist who supported Virginia's Racial Integrity Law in 1924. (The American John Powell is not to be confused with the living British film composer by the same name.)
In the first hour of GPB's Midday Music we hear the mid-century symphony in which John Powell set folk tunes he'd collected during his years traipsing around rural Virginia listening to the locals. The Virginia Symphony performs Powell's Virginia Symphony.
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<- This is a new CD of Puccini's popular opera La Boheme. It's the first American Boheme recording in half a century.
Captured in concert in Atlanta in September 2007 and released this summer, it features a fresh young (i.e. age-appropriate), not-yet-brand-name cast, with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus led by Robert Spano. Norah Amsellem sings the part of the poor Parisian seamstress Mimi, and Marcus Haddock is the poet Rodolfo.
In the noon hour on GPB, we hear the second half of Act I, where Mimi and Rodolfo meet. They're in a cold garret, but as their hearts warm up the hit tunes come thick and fast.
(P.S. 8/18: The New York Times mentions the Atlanta Symphony's new Boheme recording in a substantial article about Puccini Sunday, August 17.)
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Armed conflict has thrown the other Georgia, in the Caucasus region east of the Black Sea, into headlines this week. Did you know there's a well-known piece of classical music based on the folk music of that Georgia? It's by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, a Russian who after graduation from conservatory spent years living in Georgia conducting the Tiflis (Tbilisi) Symphony and studying the sounds of the region. We hear his Caucasian Sketches in the noon hour.
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Many thanks to Eric Nauert, Russell Wells and Alan Cooke for hosting Midday Music last week while I played hooky. After a quick end-of-summer family getaway to the coast, it's back to school and I'm happy to be back with you and the music.
A few loose Olympic tie-ins on Midday Music: We'll count Handel's Water Music as a tribute toward sports of the splashy variety. Janacek's Sinfonietta owes its genesis to a gymnastics festival, so that's a fair connection. And for the geographic angle, Chinese-born guitarist Xuefei Yang plays The Chinese Garden by Stephen Goss.
And please note the season finale of The ASO on GPB, coming up this Thursday and Sunday evening.
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Fridays, August 1 and August 8
