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 54 minutes
Bartok's Violin Concerto
Any composer who sets out to write a violin concerto knows that his or her new work will be measured against the famous concertos of the past. But in the fall of 1936, when the Hungarian composer B...
Harbison's First
The Boston Symphony premiered a new symphony on today's date in 1984—a commission for its Centenary Celebrations. It was the Symphony No. 1 by the then 45 year-old American composer, John Harbison....
Schubert's Ninth
In 1838, Robert Schumann visited the grave of Franz Schubert in Vienna and paid a courtesy call on Schubert's brother, Ferdinand, who was still alive. Schumann had heard about Ferdinand's closet fu...
Handel passes the hat
Not ALL composers were nice people, and even some of the more famous ones turn out to have been rather nasty, greedy, vindictive and altogether unpleasant specimens of humanity, despite the endurin...
Carpenter perambulates
It's time once again for our "Composer Quiz": Name a famous American composer who was also a successful businessman. If you answered insurance executive "Charles Ives," Jay will show you what's und...
Rachmaninoff makes the cut
The Russian émigré composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff was himself the soloist on today's date in 1927 in the first performance of his Piano Concerto No. 4 with the Philadelphia Orchestra, con...
Moby Crumb?
On today's date in 1972, a most unusual chamber work by the American composer George Crumb had its premiere at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Ideally, and "impractically" according t...
Massenet's "Meditation"
A new opera by Jules Massenet had its premiere at the Paris Opera on today's date in 1894. It was titled "Thais" and was based on a rather spicy novel of the same name by the popular French author ...
King Louis XIII's "Blackbird" Ballet
The thick historical novels of the 19th century French writer Alexandre Dumas, Sr. are packed with some fact and a lot of fiction. Chapter 22 of "The Three Musketeers," for example, set during the ...
The Amazing Mr. Ornstein
On today's date in 1996 at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, pianist Marvin Tartak gave the first performance of a new piano sonata, the sixth, of the American composer, Leo Ornstein. That...