wrote even more, upping the total to more like thirty eight-maybe as high as sixty seven, including works in fragmentary condition. A vast bulk of Vivaldi's opera scores is preserved in the Italian National Library in Turin. The earlier, 1714 version of Orlando Furioso, broadcast on Sunday, October 13th, presented a convincing reconstruction of one of those fragmentary scores. A masterwork he penned later on in the full blossoming of his career was Catone in Utica (1737). The last two of its three acts are complete. The first act and overture are entirely missing. Vivaldi was constantly plagiarizing himself, so a lot of the missing aria numbers can be deduced from his other opera scores. 

       Musicologist Alessandro Ciccolini has skillfully reconstructed act one and supplied an entirely plausible opening sinfonia derived from another Vivaldi opera L'Olimpiade (1734). Ciccolini composed convincingly "period" recitative passages of his own to fill in the gaps. A renouned interpreter of baroque opera,conductor Alan Curtis, prepared the critical performing edition of Ciccolini's complete restored Catone in Utica. Curtis directs the period instrument ensemble Il Complesso Barocco, with six vocal soloists, all of them well versed in producing the florid embellishments of baroque operatic singing practice.

SUNDAY NOVEMBER 24TH

       There's time remaining to fit in Handel's 1737 choral work Ode for Saint Cecilia's Day, also a setting of a poem by the seventeenth century English poet John Dryden. The recording I've chosen for broadcast comes from my own CD collection, and it's a thoroughly historically-informed interpretation. One of the pioneers of this historical approach to baroque music, Nikolaus Harnoncourt,conducts the period instrumental group he founded,the Concentus Musicus of Vienna, with the Bach Choir of Sweden. The two vocal soloists are English soprano Felicity Palmer and tenor Anthony Rolfe Johnson. Telefunken/Teldec reissued this 1978 release in compact disc format in 1989 in its "Harnoncourt Edition" series.

SUNDAY DECEMBER 1ST           

Bach, Mass in B Minor   

       Bach's magnum opus choral composition is a monument in the history of Western art music. It's also one of the most recorded sacred works in the classical music repertoire. Yet, there is no hard historical evidence that it was ever performed in Bach's lifetime. Certainly not in an actual liturgical context,because Bach's musical settings of the Latin text are too long for practical use in church. To be specific about the genre into which it falls,Bach's Mass in B Minor is a "parody mass." Between 1733 and 1738 Bach assembled and adapted its segments from previously composed items from his Lutheran church cantatas and separate numbers he had set of the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic liturgy. 

       Our station has acquired the latest historically-informed recorded interpretation of the B Minor Mass. It was made in Prague at the beginning of this year for release later in 2013 through the Accent label. Vaclav Luks directs the group of Czech singers and players he organized in 2005,the Collegium 1704 period instrumentalists and the Collegium Vocale 1704. This group and its leader won international praise for their two previous recordings for Accent of the sacred choral works of the Bohemian bass viol player and composer Johann Dismas Zelenka (1679-1743). Zelenka composed in a conservative musical style very similar to that of the Cantor of Leipzig.       

       Musicological research reveals that Bach and Zelenka knew of each other and were familiar with each other's music and were in correspondence. There was a long existing cultural connection between Prague in Bohemia and Dresden in Saxony. As a Bohemian musician employed at the royal Saxon court in Dresden, Zelenka seems to have facilitated Bach's submission of the complete score of the Mass in B Minor to his patron, the royal Elector of Saxony. Zelenka may even have been trying to set up a performance of Bach's mass in Vienna.

SUNDAY DECEMBER 8TH

PREEMPTED by broadcast of a University of Hartford women's basketball game.

SUNDAY DECEMBER 15TH

in the national vein. "Pomp and Circumstance" springs to mind immediately,then his symphonies and concertos, and then The Dream of Gerontius and his other heavyweight oratorios. Elgar had a lighter side that expressed itself in the incidental music he wrote for The Starlight Express, an adaptation for the London stage of Algernon Blackwood's 1913 fantasy novel for juvenile readers A Prisoner of Fairyland. The image of the Starlight Express, the toy train that transports people into another dimension, particularly appealed to Elgar. Some British children experience a series of adventures on the astral plane. It all leads to the revealing of the Christmas Star. The Starlight Express was staged at Christmas, 1915 and its music remains perfect for radio broadcast at Christmastime, the season which we traditionally consider to be the special time for children and when we adults indulge ourselves in nostalgic memories of childhood. That nostalgic quality comes out in Elgar's Starlight Express music. 

       As adapted for a 2012 BBC Radio production, the dialog of the stageplay was replaced with dramatic narrative taken directly from Blackwood's novel. Actor Simon Callow is the storyteller in the voiceover melodrama sequences. Elgar was so inspired he wrote more music than the play required. You get to hear all of it on two Chandos compact discs. An accomplished Elgarian, Andrew Davis, conducts the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.Elgar also wrote orchestrated songs for The Starlight Express for solo soprano and baritone. Andrew Davis orchestrated three more songs written by Clive Carey for the one-and-only 1915 theater production.

        Maybe The Starlight Express will remind you of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, with its excursion to Never-Never Land, or even the Tom Hanks movie The Polar Express. One good musical fairy tale calls for another, I say, and there's time remaining this afternoon to listen to Igor Stravinsky's famous ballet music The Firebird (1910) in a recorded version that actually tells us the story of the Russian Prince Ivan, the magic bird and the evil sorcerer Kashchey. The Russian ballerina Natalia Makarova narrates the Russian fairy tale in an English language translation that is perfectly synchronized to Stravinsky's music as performed by the Seattle Symphony under the direction of Gerard Schwarz. I last broadcast The Firebird in narrated form on Sunday ,January 5th, 1992. The 1991 Delos compact disc of The Firebird and the Chandos CD's of The Starlight Express reside in our station's classics record collection.  

SUNDAY DECEMBER 22ND

PREEMPTED