This will be the sixth time over thirty two years of opera broadcasting when I will again be presenting Mozart's immortal dramma giocoso from 1787. Don Giovanni has always been well represented in the classical music discography. Practically every significant conductor of the recorded music era,going way back in the twentieth century,has left us an interpretation. Starting with Wilhelm Furtwangler's back in the 1950's (my broadcast of Sunday, April 23 ,1989), you have heard the interpretations of Sir Charles Mackerras, Roger Norrington Michael Halusz and, most recently, Rene Jacobs (Sunday, February 8, 2009). Norrington and Jacobs gave us historically informed, period instrument interpretations. The Rene Jacobs interpretations of all the major Mozart operas for Harmonia Mundi records have won much praise. You'd think they could not be bettered. But for comparison's sake at the very least you need to hear John Eliot Gardiner's take on "The Don." Gardiner is one of the pioneers in the "period" approach to baroque and early classical music performance. Through the 1990's he recorded all the well known Mozart operas. He recorded Don Giovanni in connection with the production of the opera at the 1994 Ludwigsburg Festival in Germany. Gardiner led the period instrument ensemble he founded, the English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir. Baritone Rodney Gilfry is the Don. The Gardiner recordings of the Mozart operas for the German Archiv label have been gathered together and reissued in 2011 in an 18 CD boxed set. Again this Sunday I draw upon that Archiv reissue. Gardiner follows the Vienna version of Don Giovanni.

SUNDAY MARCH 9TH

Handel, Belshazzar 

     This past March 5^th was Ash Wednesday, inaugurating the five week (actually forty day) penitential period called Lent in the traditional Christian calendar. In old Catholic Europe (and even in Protestant countries) the opera houses closed for the duration. The church authorities did, however, permit the performance of sacred oratorio. In keeping with that long established custom, on the first Sunday in Lent I present one of George Frideric Handel's Biblical oratorios: Belshazzar, which premiered in London during Lent of 1745. It has a libretto derived largely from the Old Testament book of the prophet Daniel by Charles Jennens, who four years previously provided Handel with the libretto of Messiah. The basic difference between those two works is that Messiah is a musical reflection upon a composite of various verses from Holy Scripture including the New Testament, whereas Belshazzar is very specifically one Old Testament story. Jennens added into his Belshazzar wordbook elements from classical Greek texts (historians Herotodus and Xenophon), plus the prophecies of the fall of Babylon in Isaiah. The result was a highly dramatic,  wellnigh operatic setup for Handel to put into music. The tale is told of the rash young tyrant Belshazzar, king of the Babylonians, and the ill-fated feast he gave in the royal palace. The pleas of his mother Nitocris would not prevent him from committing sacrilege. The feasting stopped suddenly when the king saw the Lord God's handwriting upon the wall. On Sunday,February 18, 2007 I presented the 1991 Archiv release of Belshazzar with Trevor Pinnock conducting the choir and period instrumentalists of the English Concert. This Handelian rarity has been recorded again with William Christie leading his own French period instrument ensemble Les Arts Florissants with a cast of native English speaking vocal soloists. After its 1745 premiere Handel continued to tinker with the score of Belshazzar for its 1751 revival. Both Pinnock and Christie adhere as closely as possible to the original 1745 score, admitting only a few of Handel's revisions. Christie's new Belshazzar is the world premiere 2013 release of Les Arts Florissants under its own LAF record label. Both the LAF and Archiv issues come on three silver discs.

SUNDAY MARCH 16

Davies, Taverner

     For the Second Sunday in Lent I offer you a "church opera." Peter Maxwell Davies' Taverner (1972) was his first opera; strangely, it had to wait until well into the twenty first century to be released to the public on disc.  I have hitherto aired recordings of two of Davies' later operas,Resurrection (1987), which was broadcast on Sunday, September 8, 1996, and The Doctor of Myddfai (1995) on Sunday, February 5, 2000. The subject of Taverner the opera is John Taverner (c1490-1545), who wrote much beautiful choral music for the Roman Catholic Church in Tudor England. Taverner stopped composing "popish ditties," so the story goes, and converted to Lutheranism. Act one of the opera shows us Taverner on trial for heresy. Then in act two the heresy trial is turned upside down. Davies' ecclesiastical opera incorporates tweaked Renaissance dance music played on instruments of the period, among these the regal, a small reed organ. The score even quotes from Taverner's Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas. Taverner the opera was recorded in concert performance in BBC's studios in December,1996 and subsequently broadcast over BBC Radio Three in April, 1997. Oliver Knussen conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra,the London Voices and the New London Children's Choir. Also heard in the Renaissance music sequences were His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts and the Fretwork consort of viols. John Taverner is tenor Martyn Hill. In 2009 Taverner was issued on two NMC compact discs. Reviewing this recording for Fanfare magazine (Mar/Apr, 2010), Carson Cooman rates it as simply "superb." Oliver Knussen, he says, "... leads a strong cast in a definitive performance of the extremely difficult score...Taverner is a strong and compelling dramatic work that deserves to be heard." Keep listening for Taverner's entire Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas, as sung by the Tallis Scholars.

SUNDAY MARCH 22RD

The Play of Daniel, Britten, Noye's Fludde 

     On this Third Sunday in Lent we go way back in music history. Long before there was opera there was liturgical drama. Two related plays with notated music are given in the early 13^th century Beauvais Manuscript, kept in the library of the British Museum. Both plays are dramatized incidents from the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament. One of them deals with Belshazzar, the other with the ordeal of the prophet Daniel in the lion's den. The New York Pro Musica,under Noah Greenberg's direction, gave the first performance of The Play of Daniel in modern times in 1958 and subsequently recorded it for the American Decca record label. The medieval neumatic notation in the Beauvais Ms. gives only one single vocal line of Latin plainchant. Whenever and wherever The Play of Daniel has been performed or recorded it has been embellished vocally and given accompaniment with parts fpr medieval instruments. Since 1958 there actually have been quite a few recordings made of The Play of Daniel. In 2008 Harmonia Mundi released the rendition of the play recorded by the Dufay Collective, under the direction of William Lyons. Ten vocal soloists portray the characters of the Ludus Danielis. They are joined by the boy treble Choristers of Southwell Minster and five instrumentalists playing harp, bells, percussion, medieval fiddle, etc. (Their parts are partly improvised.)

     Then we bounce back into more recent times to listen to music of Benjamin Britten inspired by medieval liturgical drama. Between 1964 and '68 Britten wrote a series of "Church Parables," building upon his quasi-operatic dramatization of the life of St. Nicholas (1948). In Noyes Fludde (1958) he created a modernization of the Chester Miracle Play, which sets forth the Genesis story of Noah's flood. He employed children's singing voices and a children's orchestra performing alongside adult professional singers and players drawn from the English Opera Group. Britten retained something of the simplicity of medieval plainsong.  He was rendering into song a text in archaic English. Under the composer's direction Noyes Fludde was recorded in 1961 live in performance in Orford Church in conjunction with the Aldeburgh Festival. That recording reappeared on compact disc in 2005 in the British Decca boxed set "Britten Conducts Britten."

     This Sunday your "lyric theater" program participates in Marathon 2014, our station's annual week of intensive on-air fundraising. During the course of today's broadcast I will be going on mike to urge you listeners to phone in your pledges of monetary support for opera programming, but also for classical music programming as you hear it throughout the week, and indeed for the full spectrum of music genre shows and public affairs programs that go to make WWUH your true audio alternative in the Greater Hartford listening area. Keep in mind also that "Sunday Afternoon at the Opera" carries forward into the twenty-first an unbroken tradition of opera broadcasting on Sunday afternoons going all the way back to 1970 with the broadcasts of my predecessor in the timeslot, Joseph S. Terzo. You faithful listeners have never failed to help us meet or even exceed our Marathon fundraising goals in years past, so I thank you in advance for your generosity.

SUNDAY MARCH 30TH

Telemann, Der Tag des Gerichts; Hovhaness, From the Ends of the Earth 

     On the Fourth Sunday in Lent you get a heapin' helpin' of Apocalypse. Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) is the all-time most prolific of composers. He outlived and out-composed his two famous contemporaries Bach and Handel. Over the years I have broadcast recordings of his operas and oratorios. From 1721 onwards Telemann resided in Hamburg, where he wrote cantatas and Passions for the city's most important churches, operas for the "Goose Market" opera house and works for various civic functions. A new,heated concert hall opened in Hamburg in January, 1761. For this venue the octogenarian composer wrote his last large-scale vocal/dramatic works. One of those was an oratorio based on the Book of Revelation, Der Tag  des Gerichts ("The Day of Judgement," 1762). Telemann himself styled it a Singgedicht (ie. a "sung poem"), divided into four parts or Betrachtungen (ie. "observations"). These four scenes of Judgement Day provided Telemann with ample opportunity for tonal depiction of the whole gamut of human emotions. I have broadcast Der Tag des Gerichts once before on Sunday, January 11, 1987. There is a Telefunken LP recording of this gem of the late baroque with that pioneer of period instrument practice, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, directing the ensemble he founded,the Concentus Musicus of Vienna,along with the Vienna Choirboys and the Monteverdi Choir of Hamburg. These are basically the same musical resources employed in Telefunken's complete series of the Bach cantatas back in the 1970's. In 2010 Radio Germany's own label Rondeau Produktion released a new recording of Der Tag des Gerichts on a single compact disc. Gotthold Schwarz leads the Bach Consort of Leipzig in a scaled-down performance:only one singer or player to a part. There's considerable controversy concerning this minimalist approach to baroque music, especially when it comes to the Bach cantatas. When I auditioned the Rondeau CD for myself I found the sound of the Bach Consort to be full and satisfying. Perhaps that's because the recording session took place in the Schlosskirche of Torgau,where the accoustics seem to have enhanced the modest auditory output of the little consort.

     Now for something completely different, The music of Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000) reveals a special American spirituality. It is at once profoundly Christian and embracing of all faiths and modes of spirituality worldwide. It combines Eastern and Western modes of tonality. Everything Hovhaness wrote was dedicated to the glory of God. It's quite fitting then that a vocal group named Gloriae Dei Cantores should record a major part of Hovhaness' output of music for massed voices. There's a psalm setting From the End of the Earth, op. 187, which lends that phrase to the title of a 2011 CD compilation. Elizabeth C. Patterson is the director of the internationally acclaimed "Glories of God Singers." They have sung repertoire in eighteen different languages. The Gloriae Dei Cantores group is based on Cape Cod. Their home venue of performance is the Church of the Transfiguration in Orleans,Massachusetts. The stone structure is a contemporary expression of a fourth-century AD architectural heritage, a place singularly suitable for the choral singing of both Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox rite.

Weisman, Darkling; Diamond, AHAVA-Brotherhood 

      During the Lenten period I like to program vocal music that reflects upon some aspect of the Judaic heritage, this in anticipation of the upcoming Passover holiday. The Holocaust is the signal event of the twentieth century for Jews worldwide. It was even the inspiration for an opera: Darkling (2010), with music by Stefan Weisman and libretto by Anna Rabinowitz. The title refers to "The Darkling Thrush," a poem by Thomas Hardy. Darkling the Holocaust opera actually concerns itself with the period between the World Wars. Eastern European Jewry would soon be wiped out, leaving only dim,fragmentary memories of people and communities. Darkling gives voice to those memories. It poses the question: who will acknowledge things of Darkness as their own? Produced by American Opera Projects, Darkling is a multimedia theatrical conception calling for four singing voices, string quartet and a host of spoken-word participants. Brian DeMaris is the conductor. Albany Records released Darkling on two compact discs in 2011.

      Aaron Copland (1900-1994) is honored as the dean of all American composers in the twentieth century. Copland is also Jewish, but his younger colleague David Diamond (1914-2006) should rightly be regarded as the dean of American Jewish composers of the last century. Diamond was commissioned to compose something in celebration of the tercentenary of the founding of the Jewish community in the United States. He came up with a large-scale work for narrator and orchestra he called AHAVA-Brotherhood. Diamond assembled his own text from passages in Hebrew Scripture, the writings of the sage Hillel, the Union Prayerbook and poets Moses Ibn Ezra and Yeduda Halevi. AHAVA entreats us to share a universal compassion among all faiths,races and ethnicities. When AHAVA premiered in Washington, DC in 1954 the actor Lorne Green was the narrator. AHAVA was recorded in 1998 with Theodor Bikel as speaker (and singer,too), backed by the Seattle Symphony under Gerard Schwarz' direction. The world premiere recording of AHAVA-Brotherhood comes to us from the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music and courtesy of Naxos Records. Naxos has been issuing a series from this historic collection. This one is a single CD issue from 2004. Also included on this CD are choral and solo voice settings of prayers in the Jewish liturgy by Diamond, Morton Gould, Roy Harris and Douglas Moore. All of these, too, were recorded for the first time.

SUNDAY APRIL 13TH

Bach, St. Matthew Passion

     I have presented Bach's immortal St. Matthew Passion (1727) multiple times on Palm Sunday over the course of three decades-plus of lyric theater broadcasting. There are plenty of recordings of it in circulation. I could have gone with Rene Jacobs' new recorded interpretation for the Harmonia Mundi label (2013, Akademie fur Alte Musik, Berlin and RIAS Kammerchor). I opted this Palm Sunday not to air the great masterpiece in its original German language, as I always had done previously, but to present the Passion-oratorio in English translation and performed by all-English forces. On Good Friday, 2009 the Ex Cathedra ensemble of Birmingham in the English Midlands recorded the St. Matthew Passion live in performance in Birmingham's Symphony Hall. Jeffrey Skidmore directed the period instrument orchestra and a considerable choral body, from which, as in Bach's time, the best choral voices step forward in solo capacity to portray the characters in the Passion drama. This is a "historically informed" interpretation of the music, but certainly not a slim, one-voice to-a-part affair. In 1911 the English composer Sir Edward Elgar made a serviceable translation of the German text. Ex Cathedra drew upon a new translation by Nicholas Fisher and John Russell that is more contemporary in its wording. This English St. Matthew Passion was released in 2009 on two compact discs under the Orchid Classics label.

SUNDAY APRIL 20TH

Elgar,The Apostles

     After the disappointing English premiere of The Dream of Gerontius (1900), Edward Elgar vowed angrily that he would never again write a religious choral drama of that type. In no time, however, he was at work on another large-scale work for chorus and orchestra intended for performance at Birmingham's Three Choirs Festival.The Apostles (1903) was followed by The Kingdom (1906), forming a trio of oratorios. Some listeners and music critics find Elgar's oratorios, with their vaunted Victorian religiosity, to be wearisome and overrated. In reviewing the new Halle recording of The Apostles, Fanfare magazine's James Altena finds this music profoundly spiritual, and if interpreted properly, not at all sentimental. Sir Adrian Boult was a great interpreter of Elgar's oratorios. I have broadcast his take on The Apostles for EMI with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Philharmonic Choir, first on LP's in the original 1974 HMV release (Sunday, April 17, 1986) and then the 1992 EMI Classics reissue in CD format (Sunday, April 11, 1993). James Altena says the new version from Halle compares favorably with Boult's and Richard Hickox's,too, for the Chandos label. He ends his review with a thumbs-up: "heartily recommended" (Fanfare, July/August, 2013). Recorded live in performance in Manchester, England in May of 2012, Mark Elder conducted Manchester's famed Halle Orchestra and Halle Chorus, augmented by the Halle Youth Chorus. Baritone Jacques Imbrailo in the role of Jesus won special praise from Mr. Altena In Elgar's oratorio the other vocal soloists give us the Apostles' reactions to Christ's Passion, His Resurrection and Ascension and the ensuing Pentecost.

SUNDAY APRIL 27TH

Schubert, Die Freunde von Salamanca; Sondheim, The Frogs 

     One of the best kept secrets in classical music is that Franz Schubert, the immortal songwriter, wrote opera. An awful lot of opera. Unfortunately, he was just not a very successful opera composer. Whenever I have run across those rare recordings of Schubert's operas I have broadcast them.Schubert's Singspiel Die Freunde von Salamanca ("The Friends from Salamanca," 1815) was never performed in his lifetime. Essentially, it's a romantic comedy set in Spain. The German language spoken-word passages for this Singspiel have not survived, but the outlines of the plot are clear enough, and it's Schubert's melodious sung passages that matter in lyric theater broadcast. (So many recordings of Viennese operetta omit dialog, anyway.) This particular Schubert rarity was recorded live at the 1978 Hohenems Schubertiade. Theodor Guschlbauer directs the chorus and orchestra of Radio Austria. The singing cast assembled for that festival production was absolutely stellar for that time period in Central Europe. Soprano Edith Mathis and baritone Hermann Prey took part. Deutsche Grammophon originally released Die Freunde von Salamanca in 1981. It has been reissued on a single compact disc through the Dutch label Brilliant Classics.

     We continue in the comic vein with the 2001 world premiere release for the Nonesuch label of The Frogs, musically adapted from the ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes. America's greatest living songwriter, Stephen Sondheim, wrote both music and lyrics for the spectacular 1974 Yale Repertory Theater production. Actors in the cast included drama students Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver. Dancers in the company performed a water ballet in an Olympic-sized pool. Sondheim's songs for The Frogs have been sung and recorded separately, but never in their entirety as numbers in the incidental music for the play.Sondheim himself supervised the recording made at the Hit Factory in New York City. Nathan Lane is heard in the role of Dionysos in the recording session. He starred in the concert revival of The Frogs given in May, 2000 by the Music Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Piggybacked on the Nonesuch CD are Sondheim's songs for Evening Primrose (1967).

     In putting together the programming for this two-month period I borrowed for broadcast the recordings of Davies' Taverner and Britten's Noyes Fludde from Rob Meehan, former classics deejay here at WWUH and a specialist in the alternative musics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Telemann's oratorio Der Tag des Gerichts and the Schubert Singspiel come from my own collection of recorded lyric theater music. Everything else featured on these Sundays in March and April is taken from our station's ever-growing library of classical music on disc.  I must also thank WWUH's operations director Kevin O'Toole for mentoring me in the preparation of these notes for cyber-publication.