Your "lyric theater" program

with Keith Brown

programming selections

for the months of March and April,  2015 

Sunday 1-4:30pm

Trial by Jury

 SUNDAY MARCH 1ST

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

SUNDAY MARCH 8TH
Adams, The Gospel According to the Other Mary 

     This Sunday's audio presentation looks forward to Easter Sunday. You could describe John Adams' The Gospel According to the Other Mary as a twenty first century take on the Passion oratorio of centuries past. The "Other Mary' in question is Mary Magdalen,who with her sister Martha and brother Lazarus were friends and followers of Jesus. For the modern American musicmaster of minimalism Peter Sellars crafted a libretto combining Old and New Testament sources with the poetry of writers as divergent as the twentieth century Catholic activist Dorothy Day and the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Three solo singers portray an alternative Holy Family of two sisters and brother. Jesus' miracles, His suffering, crucifixion and resurrection are witnessed from their perspective. There is no solo voice of Jesus. Instead, a trio of countertenors deliver some of His words and provide the commentary of the Evangelist. The strident minimalist style is much toned down in the more recent compositions of John Adams (b. 1947). 

     The world premiere recording of what might alternatively be called Adams' "Passion of Mary Magdalen" was issued through Deutsche Grammophon in 2014 on two compact discs. The premiere took place in Los Angeles at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Gustavo Dudamel directed the Los Angeles Philharmonic and LA Master Chorale. Reviewer Ronald E. Grames praised the recording in the pages of Fanfare magazine (July/August,2014 issue). "Without a doubt," he wrote,"The Gospel According to the Other Mary is controversial in concept. It could not be otherwise with Peter Sellars at the helm. But it is also powerful theater, given extraordinary depth by music of remarkable authority, variety and nuance." 

SUNDAY MARCH 15TH 

MARATHON Sullivan, Trial by Jury 

      This Sunday your "lyric theater" program takes part in WWUH's annual week of intensive on-air fundraising. Now is the moment to show your support with dollars for more than three decades of "Sunday Afternoon at the Opera." My program carries forward into the twenty first century a longstanding tradition of Sunday opera programming at 91.3 FM going way back to 1970 with the broadcasts of my predecessor in the timeslot, Joseph S. Terzo. Help maintain that unbroken tradition by phoning in your pledge. I'll be going on mike at certain points during the afternoon to urge you listeners to pick up the phone and dial the Marathon 2015 pledge hotline 860-768-4009 or toll free 1-800-444-9984. (Also pledge online at wwuhpledge.org.) You faithful listeners have never failed to help us meet or even exceed our fundraising goals in Marathons past, so I thank you in advance for your generosity.

      Unfortunately, there's a possibility that my Marathon fundraising pitch will be cut short or preempted altogether by broadcast of a women's basketball tournament game.  As for the music you'll hear, I will dispense with the religious works I usually feature at this time of year in favor of lighter weight, more popular lyric theatrical fare. Listen for Gilbert and Sullivan's Dramatic Cantata in one act Trial by Jury (1871) in a 2005 Chandos recording that I have featured once before. The late Richard Hickox directs the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Chamber Choir of the Welsh College of Music and Drama. I'm presenting Trial by Jury now in advance of its upcoming staged production by Simsbury Light Opera Company,March 21st and 22nd,28th and 29th . 

I've broadcast interviews with members of SLOCO over the years, notably veteran singing actress Pat Edge and stage director Ron Luchsinger. In 2015 SLOCO celebrates its 70th anniversary as a G & S dedicated musical organization. Selections from the G & S canon of comic operas will follow the airing of Trial by Jury, plus some less familiar music of Sir Arthur Sullivan.

SUNDAY MARCH 22ND   

Handel, Judas Maccabaeus 

     Lenten programming already began on Sunday, February 22nd, which was the first of the five Sundays in Lent this year,as accounted for in the traditional Christian calendar. (Remember hearing that new Harmonia Mundi recording of C.P. E. Bach's Magnificat ?) Lent is the forty day penitential period leading up to Easter Sunday. During this period the opera houses in old Catholic Europe shut down and sacred oratorio prevailed. I have often presented one or another of Handel's oratorios on these Lenten Sundays. So, on this the fifth and last Sunday in Lent,2015 you get to hear Handel's Judas Maccabaeus, which premiered in London during Lent of 1747. I have broadcast recordings of this work several times before. It's probably the next most popular oratorio by George Frideric Handel after his immortal Messiah (1741). Central to the Old Testament story told in Thomas Morell's libretto is the figure of Judah the Maccabee, the Jewish military hero. Morell took his tale from the first of the three Apocryphal Books of the Maccabees. There's an American recording of Judas Maccabaeus released through Harmonia Mundi USA in 1993 on two CD's. (This HM release I previously broadcast on Sunday, March 20,1994.) The British baroque expert Nicholas McGegan leads the period instrumental Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and the University of California Berkeley Chamber Chorus. The distinguished Belgian tenor Guy de Mey was brought in to sing the title role. Enjoy for a second time this Sunday the American choral forces in their rousing version of the memorable number "See, the conqu'ring hero comes!" and the famous march tune that follows it.    

SUNDAY MARCH 29TH    

C.P.E.Bach, Die Letzten Leiden des Erlosers    

     It had originally been my intention to broadcast on Palm Sunday 2015 the new Ramee CD release of Reinhard Keiser's setting of Brockes Passion (1712). But into my hands has come an even more important, newly recorded example of 18th century Eastertide music in the North German Lutheran tradition: the 2014 Berlin Classics release on two CD's of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Passions-Kantate in two long parts Die Letzten Leiden des Erlosers (The Last Suffering of the Savior," 1770). This is not a setting of one of the Passion accounts from the Gospels. It dramatizes in music a contemporary poem meditating upon the events leading up to Christ's sacrificial death. C.P.E. Bach's cantata approaches the operatic in its treatment of the story. The music is in the early classical mode: not "galant," but the "expressive" or "sensitive" style, the Empfindsamer Stil of which C.P.E.Bach was the principal exponent.

     Recordings of Die Letzten Leiden are rare indeed. The only other one I know of I broadcast on Palm Sunday, March 22,1997. Harmonia Mundi issued  in 1990 a recording made in 1986 with the Collegium Vocale of Ghent and the period instrumental ensemble La Petite Bande, under the direction of Sigiswald Kuijken. On March 8,2014, to mark the 300th birthday of C.P.E.Bach, the Passion cantata was performed before a live audience in Berlin's Konzerthaus. That champion of C.P.E.Bach's music, Hartmut Haenchen led the chamber orchestra he founded in the composer's name, along with the RIAS Chamber Chorus. The distinguished German soprano Christiane Oelze was one of the vocal soloists

SUNDAY APRIL 5TH
Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius; Walton, Belshazzar's Feast  

     Over the decades I have broadcast Edward Elgar's oratorio The Dream of Gerontius (1900) many times at Easter, employing a variety of different recordings of it. Sir Malcolm Sargent (1895-1967) recorded Gerontius three times during his career as a conductor. He recorded the very first complete Gerontius for EMI in 1945, as originally pressed onto twelve 78rpm discs. That historic recording was heard on this program long ago on Easter Sunday, 1984 in a Vox/Turnabout LP reissue. Almost a full decade later Sargent essayed Gerontius  a second time for EMI with the same musical resources as in 1945: the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Huddersfield Choral Society. The recording venue was the same, too: Huddersfield Town Hall in Yorkshire in the North of England. To be sure, the 1955 mono LP Gerontius has different vocal soloists; tenor Richard Lewis as Gerontius the mortal man, baritone John Cameron as the Priest and mezzo Marjorie Thomas as the Angel of the Agony. Sargent conducted Elgar's masterpiece so Many times he made it his own. His colleagues all considered him the best choral conductor in England. He got the most out of the Royal Philoharmonic, too. The 1955 Gerontius came back into circulation on CD transfer in 1990 in EMI's line "Great Recordings of the Century." 

     Keep listening for Sargent's 1958 recording of Sir William Walton's dramatic choral cantata Belshazzar's Feast (1931). This work, too, was a Sargent specialty. Again, he leads the Huddersfield singers and Liverpool players, with the declamation of the Old Testament story by bass-baritone James Milligan. Belshazzar's Feast was piggybacked onto the two CD's of the EMI reissue of Gerontius.   

SUNDAY APRIL 12TH

Verdi, Ernani  

     I broadcast a classic old recording of this Giuseppe Verdi's fifth opera from 1844 on Sunday, November 9th of last year. It was taped live in performance at the metropolitan Opera in New York City, December 1,1962. Sony Classical has been issuing in digitally upgraded sound and in CD format a series of airtapes of radio broadcasts derived from the Met's archives. These tapes preserve for posterity the voices of operatic greats in the Golden Age of opera singing. Well, why present another old classic recording of Ernani from that era so soon again? Because the Sony release suffers from drastic cuts to its musical numbers. Verdi lovers deserve to hear Ernani in its entirety as Verdi wrote it. There's an RCA stereo LP release of Ernani from 1968 that is musically complete, and is similar on several counts to the Met's 1962 taping. Again, Thomas Schippers is on the podium, only this time he's conducting the RCA Italiana Opera Orchestra and Chorus. Again, tenor Carlo Bergonzi takes the title role as the Spanish outlaw nobleman Don Juan of Aragon,aka Ernani. Again, soprano Leontyne Price is heard opposite Bergonzi as Donna Elvira, Ernani's truelove. The RCA recording was a production of RCA Italiana studios, Rome. 

SUNDAY APRIL 19TH

Kyr, A Time for Life  

     International Earth Day falls on this coming Wednesday the 22nd. In anticipation of the special day devoted to environmental concerns, I'm proud to present A Time for Life: An Environmental Oratorio (2007) by American composer Robert Kyr (b.1952). This Earth oratorio was inspired by the initiatives of Bartholomew, the Archbishop of Constantinople and Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church. He has made the preservation of all the teeming lifeforms on our planet  his holy cause. The composition itself was commissioned by the Cappella Romana, a vocal ensemble based in the Pacific Northwest (Portland/Seattle). 

      This is a choral work on an intimate, chamber scale. The eight voices of the Cappella are joined by the three string players of Third Angle New Music. For his text Kyr took passages from the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, the Orthodox liturgy and the sayings of Native American peoples, to which he added his own lyrics, More than any other musical artwork of our time, A Time for Life should remind us of the importance of the issue of climate change. The Cappella Romana released their world premiere recording of Kyr's oratorio under their own label on a single CD.

SUNDAY APRIL 26TH

Lehar, Friederike 

      Now is the time when flowers bloom and little lambs frisk about. Springtime has always been beloved of poets. Franz Lehar's Friederike (1928), unlike so many ditsy, sentimental works in the genre, portrays on the lyric stage with some historical accuracy the single most famous love story in all of German literature: the "Sesenheim Idyll,"that brief but passionate courtship Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Shakespeare of Germany, conducted with a seventeen year old Alsatian girl, Friederike Brion, in 1770. The young poet lost heart in less than a year's time. He went off to further his literary career; poor Friederike had to resign herself to his departure. Some elements in the libretto Ludwig Herzer and Fritz Lohner proffered to Lehar tweaked history, to be sure. Other elements they made up for theatrical purposes. 

     In Friederike, Lehar gave his own operetta-style treatment to several of Goethe's lyrics, especially Heidenroslein ("Hedge Rose"), the poem Schubert set in one of his immortal Lieder. In the operetta the poet is depicted communing with the lambs, and he sings to them. A couple of numbers from Friederike became popular circa 1928. Despite the beauties of its music, this Lehar operetta had to wait until 1980 for its first complete recording. It was made in the studios of Radio Bavaria,Munich. Heinz Wallberg conducted the Munich Radio Orchestra and Chorus of Bavarian Radio. Friederike is soprano Helen Donath. Goethe is tenor Adolf Dallapozza. First issued in 1981 on vinyl discs, Friederike reappeared in 2014 on two silver discs courtesy of Warner Classics

        Those Warner Classics CD's, Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius on EMI CD's and the Berlin Classics CD issue of C.P.E. Bach's Passion cantata all come from my own record collection. John Adams' The Gospel According to the Other Mary and Robert Kyr's Earth Day oratorio come on loan from Rob Meehan, former classics deejay at WWUH, and a specialist in the alternative musics of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. All the other featured recordings in this two-month period of programming are derived from our station's ever-growing library of classical music on disc. My thanks as always go to our station's operations director Kevin O'Toole for his invaluable assistance in the preparation of these programming notes for cyber-publication.