Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 3 days 20 hours 56 minutes
Bloch's "Greatest Hit"
Today marks the anniversary of the first performance of the best-known work of the Swiss-born American composer, Ernest Bloch, whose "Hebrew rhapsody—Schelomo," for cello and orchestra, premiered a...
Higdon's "Splendid Wood"
The marimba is a percussion instrument of tuned bars, usually made of wood, arranged like the keys of a piano. These bars are struck with mallets to produce resonate, rounded—and, well, "woody"—mus...
"Citizen Kane" scores big
For the American conductor and composer Bernard Herrmann, 1940 was quite a year. On the East Coast, he had been appointed chief conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra, and on the West Coast, he wa...
Thomas' "Sun Threads"
At New York’s Alice Tully Hall on today’s date in 2003 the Avalon Quartet gave the first complete performance of a new four-movement string quartet entitled “Sun Threads,” by the American composer ...
Mozart and Strinasacchi in Vienna
On today's date in 1784, an Italian violinist named Regina Strinasacchi gave the second of two concerts in Vienna, and had the good sense to commission a new work for the occasion from an up-and-co...
Meyerbeer's "African Maid"
On today's date in 1865, the hottest ticket in Paris was for the premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer's long-awaited grand opera "L'Africaine," or "The African Maid," at the Paris Opera. And when I say "l...
Peter Boyer's Symphony No. 1
Back in the 18th century, if you were Haydn, there was a friendly Austrian prince or London impresario to pay you to write symphonies and provide an orchestra to play them. If you were Mozart or Be...
Michael Hersch's Symphony No. 2
On today's date in 2002, Mariss Jansons led the Pittsburg Symphony in the premiere performance of the Second Symphony written by a then 32-year-old American composer named Michael Hersch. Hardly ...
Beethoven waits for Liszt
If you were like Dr. Who with his Tardis, and a piano fan to boot, you might set your time machine for Paris, April 25th, 1841. That's when an all-Beethoven concert was given at the Salle Erard to ...
Stockhausen's "Sunday" from "Light"
During the last 20 years of his life, the avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen concentrated on completing an ambitious cycle of seven operas, collectively titled “Licht” or, in English...