September 4

1596 Constantin Huygens

1622 Jacob Hintze

1644 Juan Bautista Jose Cabanilles

1761 Friedrich Ludwig Emilius Kunzen

1815 Mihaly Mosonyi

1816 Francois-Emmanuel-Joseph Bazin

1824 Anton Bruckner

1859 Edoardo Mascheroni

1883 Karel Candael

1892 Darius Milhaud

1899 Frederic Curzon

1906 Antanas Raciunas

1906 Alexander Moyzes

1909 Karel Horky

1921 Ariel Ramírez

1942 Brian Cherney

1972 Mickey Helms

September 11

1614 Philipp Buchner

1711 (bapt) William Boyce

1764 Valentino Fioravanti

1786 Friedrich Daniel Rudolph Kuhlau

1807 Ignaz Lachner

1844 George Clement Martin

1865 Alfred Hollins

1874 Heinrich Kaspar Schmid

1876 Alfonso Broqua

1885 Herbert Stothart

1890 Marius Leonhard Moaritz Ulfrstad

1891 Noel Gallon

1899 Vally (Valery) Weigl

1903 Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno

1925 Harry Somers

1925 Ashley David Joseph Heenan

1935 Arvo Part

1958 Sergio Fidemraizer

1959 Jeffrey Hoover

1960 Annie Gosfield

September 18

1587 Francesca Caccini

1636 Pietro Sanmartini

1684 Johann Gottfried Walther

1752 Johann Anton Sulzer

1765 Oliver Holden

1772 Martin-Pierre Dalvimare

1835 Johan Adam Krygell

1860 Alberto Franchetti

1883 Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson [Lord Berners]

1885 Uzeyir Hajibeyov

1885 Muslim Mahammad

1893 Arthur Benjamin

1897 Pablo Sorozabal

1910 Josef Tal (Gruenthal)

1910 Leon Stein

1928 Adam Walacinski

1933 Manfred Niehaus

1937 Norman Dinerstein

1939 Naresh Kumar Sohal

1941 Haflidi Magnus Hallgrimmson

1942 Robert S. Frost

1943 Michael Vetter

1953 Gerald Custer

1964 Luca Belcastro

1981 Roger Juliŕ Satorra

September 25

1683 (bapt) Jean-Philippe Rameau

1718 Nicola Conforto

1741 Vaclav (Wenzel) Pichl

1786 George Frederic Pinto

1830 Karl Klindworth

1862 Leon Boellmann

1871 Percy Lee Atherton

1879 Luis Costa

1886 Jesus Guridi

1896 Roberto Gerhard

1902 Jeno Takacs

1906 Dimitri Shostakovich

1906 Jaroslav Jezek

1908 Eugen Suchon

1911 Lionel Nowak

1916 Tolia Nikiprowetzky

1937 Thomas Kessler

1945 Reynold Weidenaar

1955 Robert Avalon

1959 Stella Sung

 October 2

1646 Guillaume Poitevin

1704 Frantisek Tuma

1725 Jeremiah Dencke

1737 (bapt) Franz Schneider

1756 Josef Jawurek

1809 Anton Emil Titl

1817 Gunnar Wennerberg

1875 Henri Fevier

1880 George Alexander Russell

1881 Fred Barlow

1914 Bengt Viktor Johansson

1917 Francis Jackson

1922 Otmar Macha

1925 Alois Pinos

1929 Kenneth Leighton

1930 Gunter Kochan

1933 Phil Niblock

1933 Dimiter Khristov

1979 Liam Mooney

October 9

1261 Denis of Portugal

1585 (bapt) Heinrich Schütz

1626 (bapt) John Ferrabosco

1727 Johann Wilhelm Hertel

1760 Pierre Gaveaux

1766 Jean-Henri-Joseph Spoelberch de Lovenjoul

1766 Bedrich Divis [Friedrich Dionys] Weber

1835 Camille Saint-Saens

1863 Alexander Siloti

1865 Henry Dike Sleeper

1869 Harry Lawrence Freeman

1877 Jesús Castillo

1890 Alfred Julius Swan

1890 Jānis Mediņs

1904 Carl Parrish

1906 Janis Ivanovs

1914 Roger Goeb

1919 Rezső Sugár

1921 Adrienne Clostre

1922 Raymond Wilding-White

1923 Ronald Tremain

1928 Einojuhani Rautavaara

1930 Fjolnir Stefansson

1940 Hans Ulrich Humpert

1953 Roberto Sierra

1960 J. Mark Scearce

October 16

1679 Jan Dismas Zelenka

1688 Domenico Zipoli

1723 Johann Andreas Joseph Giulini

1729 Pieter (Pierre) Van Maldere

1765 Frederic Nicolas Duvernoy

1811 Gaetano Capocci

1821 Albert Franz Doppler

1826 Piotr Studzinski

1837 John Francis Barnett

1849 Arnold Krug

1849 Charles Harford Lloyd

1852 Joseph Hollman

1878 Carlos Pedrell

1903 Mario Pilati

1910 William Leonard Reed

1913 Cesar Bresgen

1936 Gerardo Gandini

1941 Derek Bourgeois

1941 Erkki Jokinen

1954 Larry Polansky

1959 Erkki Sven Tüür

October 23

1762 Pietro Generali aka Mercandetti

1801 Gustav Albert Lortzing

1819 Isaac Baker Woodbury

1846 Alexander Andreyevich Arkhangel'sky

1851 Guillaume Couture

1893 Jean Absil

1906 Miriam Gideon

1918 Matty Niël

1923 Ned Rorem

1925 Manos Hadjidakis

1938 Isabelle Aboulker

1943 Ross Edwards

1955 Toshio Hosakawa

1957 Michael Glenn Williams

1961 Brett Dean

1971 Carlo Forlivesi

October 30

1735 Edward Miller

1775 Catterino Cavos

1790 Karol Lipinski

1815 Francis F. Hagen

1864 Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge

1885 Ezra Pound

1894 Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine)

1897 Augustín Lara

1900 Rodolfo Halffter

1914 Marius Flothuis

1915 Pierre Wissmer

1931 Dawid Sofius Engela

1971 Ramunas Yaras

Your "lyric theater" program

with Keith Brown

programming selections

for the months of September and October,  2014 

Sunday 1-4:30pm

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 7TH

Thomson, The Mother of Us All 

        Before Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) wrote Four Saints in Three Acts (1924, with premiere right here in Hartford) and The Mother of Us All (1947) there was practically no such thing as a distinctively American form of opera.  Both these lyric theater works have librettos by Gertrude Stein.  A lifelong friendship developed between composer and writer,even though Stein otherwise wasn't interested in associating with musicians.  Ostensibly, The Mother of Us All is about Susan B. Anthony's crusade to secure voting rights for American women.  Don't try to look for a story line in this opera: there isn't any.  There is, however, a dramatic cavalcade of figures drawn mostly from nineteenth century history.  Besides that, running through Gertrude Stein's slightly wacky libretto is a covert commentary on her relationship with her life companion Alice B. Toklas and with others in their intellectual circle.  

        In celebration of the country's bicentennial, Santa Fe Opera produced The Mother of Us All in 1976.  Their production was recorded for release through the American label New World.  I broadcast the old original 1977 New World LP issue in 1986 and the CD reissue in 1991.  After its premiere staging at Columbia University in New York City The Mother of Us All has been performed again and again by student or amateur ensembles. A new and excellent recording was made live in performance in 2013 by the Manhattan School of Music Opera Theater.  Albany Records released it in 2014 on two compact discs.  

SUNDAY  SEPTEMBER 14TH

Rautavaara, Kaivos; Rimsky-Korsakov, Kashchey The Immortal 

        My programming records indicate I have never before broadcast an opera by Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928), although I have featured a sacred choral work of his,the Vigilia (1971) on Palm Sunday, 1999.  The composer himself writes," Kaivos ('The Mine') is perhaps the best opera I have ever written."  He makes that pronouncement in his note for the 2011 world premiere recording of Kaivos on the Finnish Ondine record label, the same label that issued his Vigilia in 1998.  Rautavaara was inspired to write his own libretto for "The Mine" after learning about the 1956 uprising in Hungary ,which the Soviets so savagely repressed.  "The Mine" is about an ill-fated worker revolt in an unnamed country that much resembles Soviet Russia.  The opera was televised in Finland on April 10, 1963 with a toned-down wordbook, so as not to offend the Russian communists, who live right next door to Finland and had long sought to dominate the Finns.  The opera had to wait almost half a century to be produced again, albeit in concert performance, but with its original libretto restored.  The recording was made at Helsinki's Tampere Hall with Hannu Lintu conducting the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra and the Kaivos Chorus of miners and  miners' wives.  Baritone Jorma Hynninen is the Commissar, the villain of the drama.

         There will be ample time remaining to listen to an "Autumnal Parable" in one act: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Kashchey The Immortal (1902). This is another one of Rimsky's Russian fairy tale operas, of shorter duration and on a smaller scale than the others. The fairy tale presented here is very similar to The Firebird, made famous from Stravinsky's ballet music treatment.  There is no magic bird, but there definitely is an evil sorcerer.  When Kashchey was revived at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1905, coming as it did in the immediate wake of the Bloody Sunday massacre, the audience read into the story an allegory on the downfall of the Czarist regime.  The performance incited a student demonstration, the police stepped in and the opera ended up being banned for a while, much to the composer's chagrin.  Kashchey The Immortal was recorded in 1991 with the orchestra, chorus and singing cast of the Bolshoi Theatre, Andrey Chistiakov conducting. Outside Russia this recording was once available through the French label Le Chant du Monde.  The Dutch label Brilliant Classics acquired the rights to it and reissued it  on a single compact disc in 2013.   

SUNDAY SEPTMBER 21ST

Wagner, Die Meistersinger, Act One and Act Two 

        The longstanding problem with broadcasting Wagner operas is their length.  Some of them simply won't fit into my three-and-a-half hour timeslot. The only way to accommodate them is to broadcast the complete opera on two successive Sundays.  This I have done in past years to accommodate Parsifal, appropriately enough, on Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.  Over two Sundays I did the same for a long German baroque opera, Telemann's Der Geduldige Sokrates.  So this Sunday I present the first two of the three acts of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg (1868), in an historic recording made live on stage at the Metropolitan Opera,January 15, 1972.  This is actually an airtape of a radio broadcast from the Met, the tape derived from the Met's audio archives.  Sony Classical was permitted to release Die Meistersinger  in digitally upgraded sonics in its series "The Metropolitan Opera."  Sony's series delves into the Met's vaults as far back as the 1940's, giving us today the opportunity to hear the voices of the Met's stellar casting lineup- singers from the period in the  mid twentieth century that opera lovers often regard as the Golden Age of opera singing.  Thomas Schippers was conducting the Met's orchestra and chorus on that occasion four decades and more ago. Among the "Mastersingers of Nuremberg" are James King, Ezio Flagello, Benno Kusche and bass-baritone Theo Adam starring as Hans Sachs.  Soprano Pilar Lorengar stars as Eva.  The Met's 1972 Meistersinger  was issued on three compact discs in 2011.  After listening to all those famous voices from the past, stay tuned for selections from Wagner's operas sung by a noteworthy contemporary voice, German soprano Petra Lang. 

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 28TH   

Wagner,Die Meistersinger, Act Three; 

Mendelssohn, Symphony No. 2, "Lobgesang." 

        Following the Wagner opera, we'll stay in the mode of nineteenth century German romanticism.  There's sufficient time remaining to audition a large scale work by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, his Symphony No. 2, "Lobgesang" or "Hymn of Praise" (1840).  This work takes off where Beethoven's Ninth Symphony leaves off.  But is it a symphony, or rather a big cantata,or maybe a mini-oratorio? Mendelssohn composed it on commission from the city of Leipzig to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Gutenberg's invention of printing.  The "Hymn of Praise" was recorded in Munich in 2012 for the French Harmonia Mundi label.  Pablo Heras-Casado conducts the Chorus and Symphony  Orchestra of Radio Bavaria.  The vocal soloists are sopranos Christiane Karg and  Christina Landshamer, joined by tenor Michael Schade.  HM released "Lobgesang" in 2014 on a single silver disc.   

SUNDAY  OCTOBER 5TH    

Vivaldi, L'Incoronazione di Dario 

        If you're an astute follower of opera you've surely at least heard of Claudio Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea ("The Coronation of Poppea," 1642), and I've broadcast recordings of that early baroque masterpiece several times in the past.  Well, get ready for "The Coronation of Darius," in Italian L'Incoronazione di Dario (1717),one of the many operas of another baroque master, Antonio Vivaldi.  The violin virtuoso, author of the famous "Four Seasons" concertos and so much other instrumental music, actually spent much of his career writing and staging operas.  Twenty or so of them survive complete, others in fragmentary scores, totaling at least 38 works, possibly as high as 49. Piles of Vivaldi manuscripts are preserved in the National University Library at Turin.  

        L'Incoronazione di Dario was the entertainment rather belatedly substituted for an opera by another composer that was suddenly withdrawn at the start of the 1716-17 Carnival season in Venice. Like so much of Vivaldi's output, Dario was written in haste, yet crafted meticulously, nonetheless, and proved to be a crowdpleaser at the Theatro San Angelo.  Two Italian musicologists prepared the score of Dario for its modern performing edition: Stefano Aresi (Act One) and Giovanni Andrea Secchi (Acts Two and Three).  Their scholarship has made possible the historically-informed recorded performance of 'The Coronation of Darius" for the French label Naďve in its ongoing Vivaldi Edition series.  Ottavio Dantone leads the period instrumentalists of the Accademia Bizantina of Ravenna and eight vocal soloists who are schooled in baroque singing practice.  The recording was produced by Deutschland Radio of Bremen and released in 2013 on three compact discs.  

SUNDAY OCTOBER 12TH 

Haydn, L'Incontro Improvviso  

        Amidst the enormous volume of music he turned out in his long career as a composer, Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) wrote at least fourteen operas.  Through the 1980's I broadcast a series of recordings,some of them world premieres on disc, of Haydn's operas as issued under the PHILIPS label.  After previously recording all of Haydn's 104 symphonies, in the late 1970's Hungarian conductor Antal Dorati turned to the operas for a similarly monumental recording project.  My personal favorite in the PHILIPS Haydn Eszterhaza Opera Cycle is L'Incontro Improvviso  ("The Unforeseen Encounter," 1775), the seventh of the operas Haydn wrote for the private opera theater of the palace of his patron the Hungarian Prince Nicolas Eszerhazy. It's in the eighteenth century genre of "Turkish" opera and has some of the same elements that went into Mozart's "The Abduction from the Seraglio." "The Unforeseen Encounter" is an Italian language drama giocosa.  

        The libretto of Haydn's Turkish opera was translated into German and it was performed publicly as a Singspiel closer in form to Mozart's famous work.  I broadcast the original 1980 LP release of L'Incontro Improvviso on Sunday, May 22, 1883.  It was reissued on compact disc in 1993,s o I broadcast the opera again on November 7th of that same year.  This Sunday I draw upon that three-CD PHILIPS boxed set.  Dorati conducts the Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne in Switzerland with a mostly British cast of singers.   

SUNDAY OCTOBER 19TH

Cilea, L'Arlesiana 

        With the sole  exception of Adriana Lecouvreur (1902), his one shot at international fame, the operas of Francesco Cilea (1866-1950) never had any currency outside his native Italy.  Even Adriana's claim for inclusion in the international operatic repertoire is shaky.  Cilea's L'Arlesiana (1897), if it is remembered at all today, is noteworthy for giving the illustrious Enrico Caruso his start.  The young tenor sang the lead male role of Federico in the premiere production at Milan's Teatro Lirico.  The story of the opera is the same as that of the French play for which Bizet provided such wonderful L'Arlesienne incidental music in 1872.  Cilea's music for his Arles opera is suffused with the natural sweetness of folksong.  

        I have broadcast L'Arlesiana once before, on Sunday, June 1, 1997, the Harmonia Mundi CD's capturing the audio part of the 1991 stage production by the Hungarian State Opera.  Previous to that, I've also broadcast Adriana Lecouvreur (Sunday, May 16, 1993).  Theater Freiburg in Germany recorded a concert production of the opera in 2012. Cilea tinkered with the score of this work over four decades of his life. He deeply regretted cutting Federico's final aria, the romanza in Act Three after the stage premiere.  Cilea's autograph of that number has long gone missing.  In accordance with the composer's intentions (we would hope), that now recovered number can be heard in the first truly complete recording of L'Arlesiana.  Fabrice Ballon conducts the Philharmonic Orchestra of Freiburg,the Camerata Vocale of Freiburg, plus the opera chorus and children's chorus of Theater Freiburg.  As you listen to this recording,g o easy on the lead tenor Giuseppe Filianati.  He does a fine job, considering that he invites comparison to Caruso.  The Freiburg L'Arlesiana came out just this year through the German CPO record label on two compact discs.   

SUNDAY OCTOBER 26TH

Verdi, Macbeth 

        Amongst his many early operas Macbeth (1847, revised 1865) is acknowledged as Verdi's first true masterpiece.  It inaugurates the composer's glorious middle period, with La Traviata, Rigoletto and Il Trovatore soon to follow.  Verdi's mind was attuned to all the fantastic and horrific elements in Shakespeare's Scottish play, especially the witches, who play an even more important role in the opera than they do in the Elizabethan stagework. Those nineteenth century "gothick" elements make this opera ideal for broadcast at Halloweentide.  

        Macbeth is well represented in the Verdi discography. We have several now historic LP recordings of it in our station's classical music record library. The oldest one, released through RCA Victor in 1959 in early stereo sound, features the cast, chorus and orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera, Erich Leinstorf conducting. (Macduff here is the recently deceased and much esteemed Italian tenor Carlo Bergonzi.) I broadcast that recording on Sunday, November 15, 1987.  There's also a 1965 London three-LP boxed set, with American conductor Thomas Schippers leading the chorus and orchestra the Accademia di Santa Cecilia of Rome and an all-Italian cast of singers, with the sole exception of Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson as Lady Macbeth.  That recording went over the air on Sunday, October 30, 2005.  

     From the Hartford Public Library's compact disc collection I borrowed for broadcast the 1986 Hungaroton Macbeth, employing Hungarian musical resources but starring the Italian baritone Piero Capuccilli in the title role.  Lamberto Gardelli was conducting. That one I aired on Sunday, October 29, 2000. The same Italian maestro was in charge in a 1971 Decca/London Macbeth on three vinyl discs.  Gardelli led the London Symphony Orchestra and Ambrosian Opera Chorus.  One of the single greatest baritone voices of the twentieth century, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925-2013) portrays the ill-fated Thane of Cawdor. The late superstar tenor Luciano Pavarotti is Macduff.  This Sunday you get to hear the 1971 London release, the third and last of the historic Macbeths we have in our station's collection.

        In programming for these two Autumnal months I must thank fellow record collector Rob Meehan for the loan of two of his recordings for broadcast:the new recording of Thomson's The Mother of Us All and Rautavaara's "The Mine."  Rob is a former classics deejay at WWUH and a specialist in the alternative musics of the twentieth and twenty first centuries.  I have contributed my own recording of Haydn's L'Incontro Improvviso.  All the other featured recordings are derived from our station's ever-growing library of classical music on disc.  I must also thank our WWUH operations director Kevin O'Toole for mentoring me in the preparation of these notes for cyber-publication.

        As a postscript to these current  notes, I must issue a correction to one of my previous Program Guide notes- the one for  Sunday, July 13th. Leo Fall's operetta The Rose of Stambul did not witness its 1922 American premiere at the Shubert Theater in New Haven, as I stated. It took place at a different Shubert Organization house, the Century Theater in New York City.  It remains true, however, that many Shubert Brothers shows started at the historic Shubert New Haven.