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
Johann David Heinichen
Synopsis
For most music lovers, the towering genius of Johann Sebastian Bach far overshadows all but a handful of other Baroque composers. But in his own time, there were many other composers far more famous than Bach.
Take the case of Johann David Heinichen, who was buried in Dresden on today’s date in 1729...
Bloch in America
Synopsis
On today’s date in 1959, the Swiss-born American composer Ernest Bloch died in Portland, Oregon, just short of his 79th birthday.
Bloch came to America in 1916, when he was 36 years old. His music made an immediate impression, and an all-Bloch orchestral concert in New York presented the premiere of his most famous work, a rhapsody for cello and orchestra entitled “Schelomo,” after the Hebrew name for King Solomon...
Kernis goes dancing
Synopsis
A new guitar concerto by Aaron Jay Kernis received its premiere at a Minnesota Orchestra concert on today’s date in 1999. The idea for this concerto was prompted by a friend of Kernis’s, guitarist David Tanenbaum, who was looking for a new work for guitar and orchestra that he could pair with the most performed of all such works, Joaquín Rodrigo's “Concierto de Aranjuez...
Schoenberg and Strauss in the E.R.?
Synopsis
In 1949, while on his deathbed, the German composer Richard Strauss supposedly turned to his beloved daughter-in-law, and said: “Funny thing, Alice. Dying is just the way I composed it in ‘Death and Transfiguration.” Strauss was referring to a tone-poem he had written some 60 years earlier depicting an artist on his deathbed, reviewing his life in art between bouts of an eventually fatal fever...
Americans in Paris
Synopsis
Among the enduring souvenirs of the Paris World Exposition of 1889 was an impressive steel tower designed by Gustave Eiffel. Originally blasted as a grotesque eyesore by leading French artists – including the opera composer Charles Gounod – it was a smash hit with those attending the 1889 Exposition.
Another great hit with attendees, including the impressionable French composer Claude Debussy, was the chance to hear exotic music from Java, Siam, and Egypt...
Anna Thorvaldsdottir
Synopsis
Today’s date in 1977 marks the birthdate of a composer whose debut release was greeted by critical raves. The New York Times noting “seemingly boundless textural imagination,” and National Public Radio hailed “one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music.” That debut disc was entitled “Rhízōma,” a Greek word meaning “mass of roots.” In botany it refers to a subterranean plant stem that sends out roots and shoots...
The Magnificent Ambersons
Synopsis
On today’s date in 1942, the RKO studio released a film titled “The Magnificent Ambersons,” based on Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel chronicling the declining fortunes of a wealthy Midwestern family and the massive social changes in American life caused by the arrival of the automobile.
The film was written, produced, directed, and narrated by Orson Welles, who hired the great film composer Bernard Herrmann to provide the film’s score...
Mendelssohn and Prince Albert
Synopsis
On this date in 1842 that Felix Mendelssohn presented himself at Buckingham Palace in London, as the invited guest of Queen Victoria and the royal consort, Prince Albert. In 1842 Victoria was not the plump matron so familiar from later portraits, but a slim woman of 23. Elegant Prince Albert, a fine amateur musician and composer of some charming songs, was the same age...
Percy Grainger, wildman
Synopsis
George Percy Aldridge Grainger was born on today’s date in 1882 in Brighton, Victoria. Although born in Australia, Grainger died in America, at the age of 79, in White Plains, New York, in 1961.
Percy Grainger led a long and remarkable life as composer, concert pianist, and educator...
John Williams' Cello Concerto
Synopsis
You might say that if anyone can claim credit for having written the “soundtrack of our times,” that person would be the American composer and conductor John Williams. Somehow, in between writing dozens and dozens of film scores for movies ranging from “Star Wars” to “Schindler’s List,” and as conductor of the Boston Pops or the Hollywood Bowl, Williams has also found time to conduct other composers’ concert works — and occasionally a few of his own...