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
Safe passage for Rachmaninoff
OK, how’s this for a movie scene worthy of “Doctor Zhivago” ... It’s October 1917 and Lenin has overthrown the Tsarist government of Russia. A composer and virtuoso pianist can hear gunfire from h...
Humperdinck's "Into the Woods?"
On today's date in 1893, the opera "Hansel and Gretel" written by a 39-year old German composer named Engelbert Humperdinck received its premiere performance at the Court Theater of Weimar. It was ...
A Beethoven marathon in Vienna
On this day in 1808 at Vienna's Theater-an-der-Wien one of the most famous concerts in the history of classical music took place. It was an all-Beethoven concert, with the composer himself featur...
Diamond's First
In all, the American composer David Diamond wrote 11 Symphonies, spanning some 50 years of his professional career. The last dates from 1991, and the first from 1940, completed after his return fro...
Mozart in Salzburg, Bloch in America
In the spring of 1775, shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, and the sparks of the American Revolution burst into flames at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Far away in Salzburg, Aust...
Wendy Carlos "synthesizes" Purcell and Bach
The Stanley Kubrick film "A Clockwork Orange" opened in New York City on this date in 1971. The music was composed, and in some cases re-composed, by Wendy Carlos. As in his earlier hit, "2001: A S...
Contrasting premieres by Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich
It's strange to read the doubts Tchaikovsky expressed in letters about many of his greatest musical works, which he first would dismiss as failures, only to change his mind completely a few weeks l...
"Leif" Insurance for Schubert?
There's an old joke that Schubert wrote two symphonies: one unfinished, and the other endless—the reference being to Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" which lasts about 20 minutes, and his "Great" S...
On Beethoven, Saint-Saens, and fossil-hunting
He was dubbed the "French Beethoven," and like Ludwig van, was famous as both a composer and a pianist. Camille Saint-Saëns was born in Paris in 1835, and died on today's date, at the age of 86, in...
Dvořák's "Toy Story?"
On today's date in 1893, Anton Seidl conducted the New York Philharmonic in the first performance of Antonin Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, a work subtitled "From the New World." This was an afternoon co...