DATE                   PERFORMER                        VENUE                    TIME                                                   

September 1

1653 Johann Pachelbel

1732 Thomas Alexander Erskine

1854 Engelbert Humperdinck

1886 Othmar Schoeck

1895 Joseph Schillinger

1906 Franz Xaver Biebl

1930 Dick Raaijmakers

1954 Elizabeth Hayden Pizer

1955 Andy Pape

1965 Paul Steenhuisen

1975 Marie-Angélique Bueler

September 8

1588 Marin Mersenne

1672 Nicolas de Grigny

1698 Francois Francoeur

1824 Jaime Nuno-Roca

1841 Antonin Dvorak

1870 Hermann Hans Wetzler

1894 Willem Pijper

1916 René Touzet y Monte

1922 Ohan Durian (Duryan)

1921 Hans Ulrich Engelmann

1933 Eric Salzman

1934 Peter Maxwell Davies

1934 Srul Irving Glick

1938 Reinbert de Leeuw

1951 Louis Karchin

1955 Daniel Palkowski

1973 Dennis Desantis

Antonin Dvorak

Birth: September 8, 1841 in Nelahozeves, Czech Republic

Death: May 1, 1904 in Prague, Czech Republic

Dvorák's father was a butcher and amateur zither player. Antonin showed early talent as a violinist. At 14 he was sent to relatives in Zlonice to learn German and while there he was taught viola, organ, piano, and counterpoint. From 1857-1859 he attended the Organ School in Prague. He worked variously as a café violist and church organist during the 1860s and 1870s and went on to become viola player in the Prague National Theater Orchestra. At this time he composed several works which he later destroyed or withdrew, the most significant being a song cycle Cypress Trees from which he drew themes in later years. The cycle was a tale of unrequited love, the result of Dvořák's disappointment that a girl he adored married someone else. He later married her sister. His first opera, Alfred, was influenced by the music of Wagner. Three years later he had his first major success with a cantata, Hymnus, which enabled him to give up his orchestra playing. In 1874, his Symphony in E won him an Austrian national prize. Two years later the Moravian duets won him the same prize. He befriended Brahms, who gained for Dvorák a contract with the publisher, Simrock, in 1877. The partnership proved a profitable one despite an initial controversy that flared when Dvorák insisted on including Czech-language work titles on the printed covers, a novelty in those musically German-dominated times. The nationalist element in such works as the Slavonic Rhapsodies and Slavonic Dances earned Dvořák increasing recognition and requests for new works. In 1884 he paid the first of 9 visits to England to conduct his Stabat Mater, which had scored a tremendous success the previous year. His popularity in Britain was immediate and sustained, both as composer and conductor, and he was financially successful enough to be able to buy an estate in South Bohemia. Several of his works were written for or first performed in England, including his Symphonies #7 and #8 and the Requiem. Cambridge made him Honorary Doctor of Music in 1891 and in the same year he was appointed professor of composition at the Prague Conservatory. The Conservatory granted him leave to accept the invitation of Mrs. Jeanette Thurber to become director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. He was uneasy with American high society and retreated to the predominantly Czech village of Spillville, Iowa for summer vacations during his stay. He remained in America for 3 years, a fruitful period in which he wrote some of his finest works, including the 'New World' Symphony, the Cello Concerto, the Biblical Songs, the String Quartet Op.96 'American', and the String Quintet. He returned to his teaching post in Prague in 1895, becoming director of the Prague Conservatory in 1901. His pupils included his future son-in-law Josef Suk, and Viteslaw Novák. In his last years he devoted his creative energies to symphonic poems and to operas. Dvořák composed for all the major forms - orchestral, chamber, instrumental, vocal, choral, and operatic. His music is a result of the major influences on his art: Wagner, Brahms, and indigenous folk music. The nationalist feeling in his music - his use of Czech dances and songs, such as the furiant, polka, skočná, dumka, and sousedská - is wonderfully integrated into classical structures.

September 15

1811 Jan Nepomuk Skroup

1858 Jeno Hubay

1863 Horatio William Parker

1884 Floro Manuel Ugarte

1890 Frank Martin

1909 Carlos Estrada

1913 Henry Dreyfus Brant

1917 Richard Arnell

1923 Anton Heiller

1956 Ned Rothenberg

1957 Miguel del Aguila

September 22

1720 Adolph Carl Kunzen

1733 Anton Filtz (Fils)

1755 Christian Kalkbrenner

1870 Arthur Pryor

1882 Emil Ábrányi

1915 Grigory Samuilovich Frid

1926 William Overton Smith

1929 Serge Garant

1930 Roger Hannay

1933 Leonardo Balada

1958 Mark Kilstofte

1961 Michael Torke

September 29

1654 Vincenz (Vincent) Lubeck

1674 Jacques-Martin Hotteterre

1727 Dr. Henry Harrington

1746 Ernst Ludwig Gerber

1841 Enrico Bevignani

1855 Michele Esposito

1879 Joaquin Nin y Castellano

1918 Harold Lawrence Walters

1945 Kyriakos Sfetsas

1949 Eric Funk

1955 Steve Perillo

October 6

1775 Johann Anton Andre

1816 William Batchelder Bradbury

1873 Oscar George Theodore Sonneck

1882 Karol Szymanowski

1936 Ralph Lundsten

1943 Udo Zimmermann

1962 Liduino Pitombeira

Karol Szymanowski

Birth: October 6, 1882 in Tymoszówska, Ukraine

Death: March 28, 1937 in Lausanne, Switzerland

Szymanowski grew up in the Ukraine, where many affluent Polish families still owned land at the time. He received his musical education initially from his father and later at Gustav Neuhaus' music school in Elisavetgrad. In 1901 he moved to Warsaw, where he had private lessons in harmony with Marek Zawirski, and in counterpoint and composition with the eminent but conservative composer Zygmunt Noskowski. Later, Szymanowski lived for a time in Berlin, helping to found that city's "Young Poland in Music" Society. During the Warsaw and Berlin years Szymanowski began absorbing the musical language of the later German masters (Richard Strauss in particular), under whose strong influence Szymanowski produced his first two symphonies. In 1914 Szymanowski visited Paris, Sicily and North Africa, and the journey renewed and intensified his interest in the French Impressionist school and in Mediterranean and Arab cultures.  These pre-war years saw the creation of his great piano cycles Metopes and Masks, of the Myths for violin and piano, of the song cycles Songs of a Fairy Princess, Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin, and Four Tagore Songs, and of the First Violin Concerto and Third Symphony, 'Song of the Night', for tenor, chorus, and orchestra. Together these two orchestral works represent the high-water mark of Szymanowski's 'impressionism', a style that blends the refined sonorities of Debussy, Ravel, and Scriabin and the impassioned late Romanticism of the New German School. Szymanowski's name as a composer was spreading throughout Europe.  Among those who championed his music were his compatriots, pianist Arthur Rubinstein and violinist Paul Kochansky.  The October Revolution interrupted that progress. The Szymanowski family had moved to Elisavetgrad just before the revolution, and shortly after their move the family home at Tymoszówka was all but destroyed. Elisavetgrad, however, was soon subject to Austrian occupation, and, in late 1919, after selling all the family land at a heavy loss, Szymanowski left for Warsaw. It was not until the song cycle Słopiewnie, written in summer 1921, that he was able to compose again. A new nationalist orientation was beginning to take shape, and it was given expression in such works as the Mazurkas op. 50 and the ballet Harnasie, both based on the exotic folk music of the southern Tatra highlands. By the mid-1920s Szymanowski was enjoying increasing international recognition. His great opera King Roger, which he had struggled to write during the war, was finally completed in 1924. He was a prominent figure in local musical life too, becoming director of the Warsaw Conservatory in 1927 and rector of the State Academy of Music in 1930. But ill health forced him to resign from the Conservatory and he was later dismissed from the academy, largely for political reasons. During the next two years he managed to write his Bartókian Symphonie concertante for piano and orchestra and Second Violin Concerto.  But from 1934 onwards he was unable to produce much of substance. Faced with alarming financial problems and rapidly deteriorating health, he was obliged to undertake exhausting concert tours throughout Europe. His declining condition forced him to enter a sanatorium, and he died of tuberculosis in Lugano, Switzerland in 1937.

October 13

1877 Elisabeth Kuyper

1879 Peter Van Anrooy

1890 Gösta Nystroem

1897 Harrison Kerr

1908 Enrique de Marchena

1912 Hugo Weisgall

October 20

1788 Philip Knapton

1792 Anton Bernhard Furstenau

1819 Karol Mikuli

1874 Charles Ives

1877 Josephine McGill

1883 Alexander Krein

1901 Hans-Otto Borgmann

1913 Angelo Ephrikian

1944 William Hugh Albright

1945 Thomas Pasatieri

1945 Trond Hans Farner Kverno

1950 Elodie Lauten

1955 Diego Luzuriaga

Charles Ives

Birth: October 20, 1841 in Danbury, CT

Death: May 19, 1954 in West Redding, CT

Charles was the son of George Ives, a bandmaster and a musical experimenter who taught his son the rudiments of music but also encouraged him to be open-minded and independent. Charles' musical skills quickly developed. He was playing organ services at the local Presbyterian church from the age of 12 and began to compose at 13. In 1894, Ives entered Yale to study music, and his father died at age 40 from a heart attack. At Yale, Ives experimental tendencies were met with disapproval from professor Horatio T. Parker. Ives first mature compositions adhered to conventional structures and included his First Quartet, and First Symphony, which served as his thesis. After barely managing to earn his diploma, Ives moved with a couple of his fraternity buddies to an apartment in New York City. He became organist at Central Presbyterian Church and composed his first large-scale attempt to reflect the spirit of America, the Symphony #2. In off hours, Ives worked on his unconventional, highly dissonant and ragtime-influenced Piano Sonata #1. In 1902, a friend introduced Ives to the insurance agent Julian Myrick. They co-founded the first Mutual Life Insurance office in Manhattan. Through his hard work and easy ability to communicate with customers, Ives would become a very wealthy insurance executive. In 1906, he married Harmony Twichell, a woman from a prominent New England family. Ives continued to compose his music on commuter trains, in the evening, and on weekends, writing what pleased him without worrying what the outside world might think of it. In order to check details of orchestration, Ives hired out theater orchestras to rehearse his scores. In the following decade, Ives would produce several of his most important masterworks, the Symphony #4, the Orchestral Set #1: "Three Places in New England," the String Quartet #2, and the massive Piano Sonata #2 "Concord, Mass., 1840-1860," commonly referred to as the Concord Sonata. With the beginning of America's involvement in World War I, Ives raised funds for the war effort, supported an unsuccessful constitutional amendment prohibiting a declaration of war without the support of two-thirds of the populace, published a manual (Surveying the Prospect) that for years served as a bible for the insurance industry, and composed at an astounding pace. In October 1918, Ives suffered a severe heart attack that nearly killed him. In 1921 he published the Concord Sonata and in 1922 followed it with 114 Songs, containing songs dating from 1888 to the eve of publication. Many of Ives's subsequent innovations were carried out in his songs, which are of an astonishing variety. They range from imitations of German lieder, to powerful, virtually atonal declamations, from serene hymn-tune pieces to boyishly humorous ones, from strident epigrams to homely numbers. Often these songs were derived from chamber or orchestral pieces, or else they were later arranged for different forces. In the 1930s the sonata was taken up by John Kirkpatrick and Three Places in New England by Nicolas Slonimsky, but most of Ives's scores remained unheard until after World War II. In 1930, Ives and Myrick both decided to retire, and from this time forward Ives concerned himself with revising existing works. In 1947, Ives was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music for his Symphony #3, completed nearly 40 years earlier. With Ives' death in May 1954 his musical legacy became top priority for a generation of biographers, researchers, and performers.

Ives music was influenced by his father's individualism, New England transcendentalism, and his belief in democratic ideals. It was rooted in the parlor musicales, the outdoor sing-songs, the marching bands, the hymns sung in church, and other impressions of his boyhood. Ives' early works expertly channel European influences into totally fresh constructs; mature works make use of quotation, simultaneous clashing metres, quarter-tones, the use of spatially separated groups of instruments, collage techniques, homegrown forms of pitch organization and dense, massed blocks of clustered chords.

October 27

1739 Franz Ignaz Kaa

1746 Georg Anton Kreusser

1775 Traugott Maximilian Eberwein

1782 Niccolo Paganini

1817 Antoni Katski

1873 Henry Tate

1912 Conlon Nancarrow

1921 Anestis Logothetis

1924 Pompeyo Camps

1927 Dominik Argento

1938 Elliot Del Borgo

Niccolo Paganini

Birth: October 27, 1782 in Genoa, Italy

Death: May 27, 1840 in Nice, France

The most famous violinist of his time, Paganini was taught initially by his father, a devoted amateur musician. Niccolò also took composition lessons in Genoa. His rapid progress on the violin, however, was such that his father was soon compelled to send him to Giacomo Costa, maestro di capella of the Cathedral at San Lorenzo, for further study. Niccolò was soon giving public concerts, and when he went to study in Parma in 1794, the famous violinist Alessandro Rolla said he could teach him nothing. He did, however, study composition in Parma, with Paër, writing numerous instrumental works. He performed little during the initial years of the 19th century, instead devoting his time to composition. In 1800 he went with his family to Livorno. A year later he settled in Lucca, as leader of a newly formed orchestra, and two years after that was appointed violinist to the court there. In December 1809 he left to pursue a solo career. For the next 18 years Paganini gave concerts throughout Italy, his triumphant success in Milan in 1813 establishing his position as the foremost virtuoso of his generation. He also conducted frequently and composed a series of works for violin, almost all of which were designed to display his prodigious technical skills. In 1828 he travelled to Vienna for a series of wildly successful concerts, thus launching a considerable European career, taking him to almost all the major cities. Although there were instances of quite serious critical opinion, he had particular success in Germany and in Paris and London. His astonishing technical prowess amazed audiences of the day, and many colorful legends arose to explain his remarkable abilities. One of the more popular presumed that he was in league with the Devil, a theory supported by his cadaverous physique. In 1832 he commissioned a work for viola from Berlioz, who eventually produced Harold en Italie. Disappointed with its lack of virtuoso display, Paganini never performed it. Paganini's last years were troubled by ill health.  In 1838 he lost his voice completely, a harbinger of the throat cancer that would later claim his life. Although he withdrew from public performance, he remained in a variety of ventures. In Parma he became director of the Teatro Ducale, making many wide-ranging, but ultimately futile proposals for orchestral reform. Paganini died in Nice, leaving no fewer than 11 Stradivari instruments in his estate. Paganini had an enormous influence on subsequent generations of violinists, partly through his technical example but also through his compositions, particularly the famous Caprices for solo violin, which remain a virtuoso pinnacle. He set an entirely new standard of virtuosity. Many of the most demanding techniques of the present-day violinist are associated primarily with him, including 'ricochet' bowing, left-hand pizzicato, and double-stop harmonics. But just as important was his impact on a whole generation of composers who attempted to emulate the Caprices. After first hearing him play in Paris in 1832, Liszt set out to duplicate Paganini's achievements on the piano. Paganini's own violin concertos are written in the Italian operatic style of the day, alternating between lyric charm and ferocious technical display, and are the only works of his which remain in the repertory.

Sunday September 11th: Bantock, Omar Khayyam, Sir Granville Bantock dictating (1868 - 1946) was a contemporary and colleague of Edward Elgar. But whereas Elgar's music entered the international repertoire, Bantock's vast body of composition was a forgotten after his passing. I think of him as an English Richard Strauss. Bantock wrote in that same grand lush late romantic style; witness his monumental secular oratorio Omar Khayyam (1906), settings of extensive passages from the Rubaiyat of the eleventh century Persian poet and astronomer, as lyrically rendered into English by Edward Fitzgerald. Like Strauss, Bantock makes use of leitmotivs to knit passages of the oratorio together. Listen in particular for the muezzin's call-to-prayer motif in the horns, and for the tinkling bells of the camel's harnesses from the percussion section from of the huge orchestra required to back a big chorus and three vocal soloists. The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus were led by Vernon Handley. It required the space of the Watford Colosseum near London to accommodate all the singers and players. The recording seems to have resulted from the BBC broadcast of Bantock's work on this Radio Three cultural stream. The UK label Chandos released it on three CDs.

Sunday September 18th: Vivaldi, Ottone in Villa, Magnificat. This Sunday I continue my long ongoing series of broadcasts of the operas of Antonio Vivaldi (he wrote at least 49 of them!) as recorded for the French label Naïve in its "Vivaldi Edition." This particular issue from Naïve also constitutes volume 46 in the even longer series "Treasures of the Piedmont." Piles of Vivaldi manuscripts in the composer's own hand have been preserved in Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin, including the autograph scores of the opera serie of "The Red Priest." Ottone in Villa is Vivaldi's first complete operatic composition. It was staged not in Vivaldi's hometown, Venice, but in nearby Vicenza in 1713. Domenico Lalli's libretto shows us a rather gullible emperor Ottone caught between two scheming women, Cleonilla his wife and his henchman's mistress Tullia. Disguise and deception are part and parcel of the Italian lyric theater of the baroque. Contralto Sonia Prina is heard in the breeches role of Ottone. Cleonilla is soprano Veronica Cangemi. Tullia is soprano Roberta Invernizzi. Giovanni Antonini directs the period instrument players of Il Giardino Armonico. Naïve released Ottone in Villa, as realized from the Turin autograph and performed in historically informed style, on two compact discs in 2010.

In addition to hundreds of concertos for all sorts of instruments, for which he's so well known today, Vivaldi wrote extensively for the Church. There will be time remaining this afternoon to listen to one of his settings of the Magnificat (R610/611 in G minor) taken from a different Vivaldi series from Naxos records (Volume 3 of "Sacred Music"). Kevin Mallon directs the Canadian period instrumental group, Aradia Ensemble, with four vocal soloists. Naxos gave us six sacred vocal works on a single CD in 2008.

Sunday September 25th: Beethoven, Fidelio. This Sunday we continue audition of the new Sony classical series "The Metropolitan Opera:" historic radio broadcast air tapes of live performances at the Met, drawn from the Met's audio archives, the old reels digitally reprocessed for release in CD format. The last one you heard in the series was just this past summer, on Sunday, August 21st, when I presented Rossini's "Barber of Seville," as broadcast from the Met on December 16, 1950. From a performance that took place on February 13, 1960 the Met gives us Beethoven's Fidelio (1813). I have presented Fidelio not so long ago, on Sunday, November 15, 2009 from a rival historical series recorded live at Glyndebourne in England, only that Fidelio dates more recently in the Glyndebourne archives, from the festival of the summer of 2006. The Met's cast for Fidelio in 1960 could not be bettered. The great Swedish diva soprano Birgit Nilsson is Leonore, the heroine of the Opera. Floreston, Leonore's beloved husband, whom she rescues from execution, is tenor John Vickers. Karl Böhm directs the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus.

Sunday October 2nd: Mozart, Idomeneo. This is Mozart's first mature masterpiece of opera, first staged at Munich in 1781. You listeners got to hear it in it's musically complete form with concluding ballet sequence, performed in historically informed style, on Sunday, October 16, 1994 with John Eliot Gardiner conducting (three CDs, Archiv, '91). Two historic recordings of the opera performed in more traditional manner I aired in February, 1993 and October, 2010, both of them originating at Glyndebourne 1964. The Indomeneo I offer today is a modern musicologically researched one from the renowned interpreter of Mozart, the late Sir Charles Mackerras (1926 - 2010). I have broadcast his Le Nozze di Figaro (Sunday, October 1,'95) on three Telarc CDs. Mackerras led the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a recording made at Usher Hall, Edinburgh in the summer of 1994 in the course of the Edinburgh Festival. Much later in his conducting career in the summer of 2001 Mackerras directed the same orchestra, joined by the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, and recorded in the same hall. The late esteemed mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson took on the breeches role of Idamante, son of Idomeneo, King of Crete, who was tenor Ian Bostridge. The 1994 Edinburgh Idomeneo comes to us on three EMI classics CDs. Mackerras was due to perform Idomeneo yet again at the Edinburgh Festival set for August, 2010, but he died on July 14th. His 2001 Idomeneo is, as you might expect, musically complete with ballet.

Sunday October 9th: Hadel, Ariodante. At long last, over the past two decades all of Handel's Italian opere serie have been recorded musically complete and in historically informed interpretations. I've broadcast as many of them as I have come across. New to me is Ariodante (1735) in which Handel outdid himself in providing operatic spectacle to the London theatergoers. Ariodante was intended for John Rich's new Covent Garden theater, which opened in 1732. The stage was splendidly equipped with machinery for special effects; moreover, Rich employed a troupe of dancers. Handel crafted arias for English vocalists as well as for his crew of Italian star singers and provided more music for chorus than his previous operas, plus sprightly dance numbers. For a story he looked to the Age of Chivalry as depicted in Ariosto's epic poem Orlando Furioso. Despite all that was lavished on the production of Ariodante it ran for only six performances. Although it was not one of Handel's most successful operas, it remains one of his best. Musicologists, like Handel authority Winton Dean, have always admired it and it has been recorded fairly frequently. The one made at Villa San Ferma, Lonigo in Italy in 2010 is its sixth commercial recording. Alan Curtis, whose Handel recordings have been much praised, directs the period instrument ensemble Il Complesso Barocco. Mezzo Joyce Didonato stars as the prince Ariodante, a heroic rôle that in Handel's day would have been taken by the illustrious castrato Carestini. EMI/Virgin Classics released Ariodante this year on three compact discs.

Sunday October 16th: Saariaho, L'Amour de loin, Slovenija! From two far removed corners of Europe come opera and song. Troubadors were the singer/songwriters of medieval Europe. For her first opera Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952) has taken up the story of a 12th century French nobleman and trouvere who followed the dictates of courtly love with tragic result. The libretto of L'Amour de loin (2004) is not in Finnish, as you might expect, but in French, prepared by Amin Maalof, a French novelist of Arabian lineage who also speaks Arabic. The story of the opera has a certain subtext of East-meets-West. Jaufré Rudel, Prince of Blaye in the French province of Aquitaine, journeys to the North African shore, in Muslim territory, to see the beloved one who is the subject of his chansons: Clemence, Countess of Tripoli. He dies in her arms. I have not heard the first recording made of L'Amour de loin in 2004 for Deutsche Grammaphon, with Esa Pekka Salonen conducting a live performance in Helsinki. The two CD issue from 2009 offered by French Harmonia Mundi is very much a German studio production, made in Berlin at Teldex, but in coproduction with the French Theatre du Chatelet. Kent Nagano leads the German Symphony Orchestra of Berlin and the Berlin Radio Chorus.

The modern country known as Slovenia was carved out of the old Austrian crownland provinces of Styria and Carniola. The art music of the Slovene people has been neglected, but that has been remedied with another Harmonia Mundi release from this year on a single compact disc: Slovenija!, a celebration of Slovene art song. Bernarda and Marcos Fink are both singers of Slovene parentage, born in Buenos Aires, who are part of the Slovene émigré community in Argentina. They sing solo and in duet in the songs of Slovene composers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anthony Spiri accompanies them on piano.

Sunday October 23rd: Verdi, Otello, Canzoni. Giuseppe Verdi came out of retirement to give this masterwork to the world. He had written nothing new since his Requiem of 1874. At the time of the premiere of Otello at La Scala in 1887, at seventy-odd years of age, the most amazing thing about the Grand Old Man of Italian opera was that he had yet another Shakespearean opera Falstaff (1893) in his future. Verdi's two last operas owe their greatness in part to the excellent Italian language adaptations of Shakespeare's plays provided by Arrigo Boito. Otello has been much recorded. I have presented it twice before, the first time in October of 1987 when I aired the EMI soundtrack to Franco Zeffirelli's 1986 firm version of the opera, starring tenor Placido Domingo in the title rôle, opposite soprano Katia Ricciarelli as Desdemona. Then, in October of 1997 came the Koch International CD release which featured Nicola Martinucci as the Moorish general. A tenor from New Zealand, Simon O'Neill tackled the rôle when the opera was recorded live in performance at the Barbican, London, late in the year 2009. A German soprano Anne Schawanewilms portrays the general's maligned wife. The troublemaking office Iago is British bass-baritone Gerald Finely. Sir Colin Davis conducts the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Otello was issued on two compact discs through the orchestra's own label LSO Live in 2010. There will be time remaining to sample Verdi's songs on Canzoni. Seventeen of them are set forth on a 2011 Telos Music silver disc. Three vocalists trade off in these songs: the German Diana Damrau, an Austrian Paul Armin Edelmann, and Columbian tenor Cesar Augusto Gutierriz. Conductor/pianist Friedrich Haider accompanies them.

Sunday October 30th: Gounod, La Nonne Sanglante. For Halloweentide I have an opera about a ghost that I guarantee you've never heard before. Charles Gounod greatly desired a popular hit in composing his third opera, so he turned to the most popular hack playwright of his day, Eugene Scribe, to come up with a suitable libretto. Scribe adapted for the lyric stage a gothic horror novel by the Englishman Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk (1796), which became in Scribe's French language version La Nonne Sanglante ("The Bleeding Nun"). Gounod's operatic treatment ran for only eleven performances in 1854. It was withdrawn from the Paris Opera due to harsh criticism about the absurdities of its plot. La Nonne Sangiante disappeared altogether until its stage revival in 2008 by a German opera company, Theater Osnabrück. This work is no masterpiece, but it possesses all the beautiful singability that we expect from Gounod. Writing in the November/December, 2010 number of Fanfare magazine concerning the cpo CD release of La Nonne Sanglante, Joel Kasov understands how that provincial company stretched the talents of its singers and players to the limit in giving us the opera's world premiere recording. Nevertheless, he concludes "...I would recommend the recording to anyone interested in Gounod before Faust." Hermann Bäumer conducts the Osnabrück forces. I originally scheduled "The Bleeding Nun" for broadcast on Sunday, March 6th of this year, but that particular program was preempted. My rescheduling on this Sunday before Halloween is a much more appropriate fit.

I must thank my friend and fellow record collector Rob Meehan for loaning me his copy of Blitzstein's Regina and the Harmonia Mundi release of Kaija Saarianho's first opera. Over a period of decades he has permitted me to broadcast so many items from his huge personal collection. Rob specializes in the alternative musics of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. From my own collection comes Granville Bantock's Omar Khayyam. All the other featured programming in this two month period is derived from our station's ever-growing library of classical music on disc. Thanks also go to Vickie Hadge of Virtually Done by Vickie for the preparation of these notes for cyber-publication.