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 52 minutes
Verdi's "Simon Boccanegra"
The stage directions read: "The garden of the Grimaldi Palace outside Genoa. On the left side, the palace, directly in front, the sea. Dawn is breaking." The evocative music is by the Italian oper...
Ruggles and Cowell anniversaries
Today's date marks the birth anniversaries of two major 20th century American composers: Carl Ruggles was born in East Marion, Massachusetts on today's date in 1876, and Henry Cowell, in Menlo Park...
Rachmaninoff's Vespers
On today's date in 1915, the Moscow Synodal Choir gave the premiere performance of a new choral work by Sergei Rachmaninoff. In Russian, the work was titled Vsenoshchnoe bdeniye, which translates a...
Tabloid Paganini?
If "Entertainment Tonight!" were around in Paris in 1831, they would probably have offered a breathless special edition report on a concert that occurred on today's date that year. EVERYBODY who ...
Kernis' Violin Concerto
In Toronto on today’s date in 2017 violinist James Ehnes gave the world premiere performance of a new violin concerto by the American composer Aaron Jay Kernis. The work was written specially for ...
Daniel Pinkham
Some special music had its premiere at Harvard University (in Cambridge, Massachusetts) on today's date in 1980. It was commissioned to honor the memory of Walter Piston, who had taught composition...
Beethoven's Op. 127
Today in 1825, one of Beethoven's late chamber works, his String Quartet in E-flat, Op. 127, received its premiere in Vienna by the Schuppanzigh Quartet. The Quartet had only received the music two...
Barber sings Barber
Among the talented music students at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute in the late 1920s, a teenager named Samuel Barber must have stood out. After all, he was an incredibly gifted triple talent: a p...
A Hopeful Fanfare
Perhaps the fanfare is the most optimistic and hopeful of all musical forms, since it signals the start of something new and worth noting. The American composer Adam Schoenberg* was feeling opti...
Richard Strauss, hero
I believe Oscar Wilde gets credit for the line, "But enough about me — what do YOU think about me?" Roughly a century ago, this portrait of the self-absorbed ego not only got laughs on the London s...