At the Universalist Church, 433 Fern Street, West Hartford.

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Walter Miskin - Wednesday Synthesis.

     This is Walt Miskin's second stint as a WWUH volunteer. He started out at the station in 1976 when he served as station program director and then general manager. He left the station in 1981 to pursue other interests and then rejoined the staff in 2013.

     

     He currently hosts the Wednesday afternoon Synthesis program "Unclewobbly's Afternoon Extravaganza" (1-4pm) which features Rock music, primarily from the late 60's to 80's with "some other stuff thrown in as the spirit or requests move me". Prior to the Synthesis slot Walt hosted Tuesday Accent on Jazz for over a year.

      "I wanted to get back into radio when I retired from Acuative Inc. as a Senior Network Engineer in 2013" said Walter. "I was in radio from 1976 to 1981, first at WWUH and then at as an announcer at WIOF Magic 104. I also worked at Meriden's WMMW on weekends."

     His musical Interests are varied and all genres of music interest him. He plays percussion.

     Despite being off the air for over two decades Walt found it easy to get back into the swing of things. "Being a former station GM and PD (made) it easy for to get

back on staff and on the air again."

     Walt is married to Erica Mickin with two daughters, Lisa and Jessica.

 
      Turtle Man has been a WWUH volunteer since November, 2013 and has been a station listener for many years. In addition to helping with the station's fund drives he hosts Boomer's Paradise which airs every Sunday night at midnight. 

      His show is one of the seven weekly Gothic Blimp Work programs offered by WWUH, a program that first aired in July, 1969! " I enjoyed working at radio station during college years and wanted to get back into radio broadcasting" and Boomer's Paradise made it's debut in February, 2014. It's focus is on music of the Baby Boomer generation as well as all types of rock music past and present. Why does he do the show? "I enjoy sharing music with other people because our lives are so intertwined with music."

     About WWUH " the programming is unique to the area that it serves. The diversity of musical genre is quite large and typically can't be found anywhere else. The radio program hosts are knowledgeable about the music they play because they care about it as much as their listening audience.

      Turtle Man volunteers at the CT Radio Information System (CRIS) doing live news broadcasting and pre-recording articles for national newspapers. He is a retired Business Analyst with over 35 years of experience. At the time of his retirement he had his Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP) certification from the International Institute of Business Analysis. He was one of the first Business Analyst to receive this certification where I was employed at The Hartford.

 

with Keith Brown

programming selections for the months ofMay and June,2016

 

    Piggybacked on the second of two Chandos CD's is Elgar's patriotic "ballad" for chorus and orchestra The Banner of Saint George (1897).Written, again on commission, in celebration of Queen Victoria's Jubilee year of reign, it gives us a little medieval romance about the sainted knight who slays the dragon and rescues the fair damsels from being sacrificed to the monster. Elgar brings his musical treatment of a rather overwrought text to a stirring conclusion in praise of empire and the Union Jack, the nation's banner. Again, it's Davis directing the Bergen Philharmonic, Grieg Chorus and Collegium Musicum. Regular listeners to this program may remember when I broadcast The Banner of St. George as additional programming on Easter Sunday, 2015 following the feature of the afternoon, Elgar's oratorio The Dream of Gerontius (1900).

 

This was one of the single most popular and enduring of the tragedies lyriques of Jean Baptiste Lully (1632-87). First produced in 1683 at the Paris Opera, it was so well liked it was referred to as "the Opera of the People." Phaeton was performed in many other European cities: Antwerp, Regensburg, Amsterdam, Brussels, Ghent and The Hague. This was unusual, because outside of France, opera of the French baroque generally could not hold its own against the overwhelming international popularity of Italian opera. Following its premiere production, Phaeton was restaged in Lyon, and the Paris Opera revived it again and again throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. Phaeton was worthy of all its' revivals because it is one of the most musically beautiful of Lully's operas; its' grand stage spectacle was combined with tuneful vocal airs and choruses and plenty of sprightly dance numbers. The story of the opera is taken from a classical source, Ovid's Metamorphoses, which tells of the rash youth, Apollo's son, who failed to manage the Sun God's chariot, and was consequently struck down by Jupiter's thunderbolt. Lully's librettist Quinault embellished the legend with amorous and political subplots. Mark Minkowski and his period instrument ensemble Les Musiciensdu Louvre put in a splendid interpretation of Phaeton for the French record label Erato. I broadcast the two-CD Erato set on Sunday, April 23, 1995. Phaeton has been recorded anew for another French record label Aparte. Their 2012 release on two silver discs gives us Christophe Rousset's treatment of the Lullian masterwork. Rousset directs his own periodinstrument group Les Talens Lyriques, augmented by the Chamber Choir of Namur. Phaeton was recorded live in concert performance at the Salle Pleyel in Paris.

 

This is the tenth of Mozart's operatic works, assigned the number 208 in the Koechel catalog of Mozart's entire musical output. It certainly belongs in the genre of opera, but it's been labelled a serenata, a pastorale - even a cantata, since its' premiere at Salzburg in 1775 may have been in unstaged concert performance. The early Mozart style is easy to listen to, and the libretto by Pietro Metastasio taxes no one's mental powers. The mode of Metastasianopera seriawas already old-fashioned when the young musical genius got to work on a much altered wordbook for "The Shepherd King." One conservative feature is that it calls for the voice of a male soprano or castrato.Female soprano Reri Grist took on the breeches role of Amenta, the noble-minded shepherd who ought to be king of Sidon in the time of Alexander the Great. Reri Grist sang in a 1970's era recording for RCA that was picked up for LP reissue in 1981 through the Arabesque label. Denis Vaughan conducted the Orchestra of Naples, with a cast that included noteworthy Italian tenors Nicola Moni and Luigi Alva. The Arabesque re-issue I broadcast on Sunday, July 23, 2006. IL Re Pastore has been recorded anew by the periodinstrument orchestra and singers of Classical Opera, a musical organization specializing in the lyric theaterworks of Mozart and his contemporaries. Ian Page directs the singers and players. In the role of Alessandro is the distinguished British tenor John Mark Ainsley. Aminta is soprano Sarah Fox. Signum Classics of the UK released L Re Pastoreon two compact discs in 2015.

 

Question: when is a Mozart opera not a Mozart opera? Answer: when it's Les Mysteres d'Isis, an adaptation of "The Magic Flute" (1791) for an 1801 production in Paris. A musicmaster from Bohemia, Ludwig Wenzel Lachnith (1746-1820) is credited as a composer of this pastiche (or is it a travesty?). He retained many of the well-known numbers from the original Singspiel, but cut the glorious coloratura revenge aria of the Queen of the Night. Lachnith kept the famous overture intact. He also inserted his adaptations of arias from other Mozart operas and composed sung recitatives to replace these spoken German dialogue. The new French libretto of "The Mysteries of Isis" changed the names of some of the familiar characters of "The Magic Flute," and tweaked the story line, too. The result of all these alterations is a lyric stagework that only vaguely resembles Mozart's Masonic opera. Parisians had to wait until 1829 to experience Die Zauberfloteas Wolfgang Amadeus actually wrote it. Les Mysteres d'Isis was revived repeatedly after 1801. The beauty of Mozart's music insured its popularity. So how good is Lachnith's adaptation? Judge for yourself by listening to the Spanish Glossa label's two-CD release from last year of Les Mysteres. It was recorded at the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 2013. Diego Fasolis directs the period instrument players of LeConcert Spirituel and the Flemish Radio Choir with a cast of 11 vocal soloists.

 

What I have to offer you on this Sunday of the Memorial Day holiday weekend is absolutely red, white and blue. Everybody knows John Philip Sousa's "El Capitan" march: nothing could be more vibrantly American in spirit. The tune in that March came from Sousa's comic operetta El Capitan (1895). Yes, believe it or not, the March King composed 15 operettas for the American lyric stage. El Capitan was his most popular and significant work in that genre. Jerrold Fischer and William Martin restored Sousa's original score for the 1997 Zephyr compact disc recording of El Capitan. It was made in the big hall of the Kannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois/Urbana. Ian Hobson directs the Sinfonia da Camera, with the University of Illinois Chorale and Band, plus vocal soloists. I last broadcast the two Zephyr CD's on Sunday, the Fourth of July, 1999. Keep listening for concert, theater and parlor songs of John Philip Sousa (1854-1932), as interpreted by soprano Joyce Guyer and baritone Michael Wilson (a 1991 PreiserCD release).

 

The longstanding problem with broadcasting the operas of Richard Wagner 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 intwo broadcasts on two successive Sundays. This I had done to accommodate Parsifal on Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, 2013. Over two Sundays I did the same for a long German baroque opera, Telemann'sDer Geduldige Sokrates. This Sunday for a second time I present the first two of the three acts of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868). The last time I presented Die Meistersingerthis way was on two Sundays in September, 2014. You heard a historic recording made live on stage at the Metropolitan Opera, January 15, 1972. That was actually an air tape of a radio broadcast from the Met. Thomas Schippers conducted the Met's orchestra and chorus and bass-baritone Theo Adam starred as Hans Sachs. Listen today to a recording made live in concert performance at the Philharmoniehall in Berlin, June 3, 2011. Marek Janowski was directing the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, and bass-baritone Albert Dohmen sang as Sachs. Released on four Pentatone CD's in 2011, this Meistersinger anticipated the two-hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth and 1813. The German Pentatone label launched a bicentennial recording project that would give the public the ten best known operatic masterpieces of Wagner in state-of-the-art sonics and with singing casts made up of the finest Wagnerian voices of our time. All ten recordings in the series originated at the Philharmonie with Janowski on the podium. I have already broadcast several of the operas is in the Pentatone series.

Keep listening after the concluding third act of the Wagner opera for later operatic fare - something that falls into the general category of Viennese operetta. The Austrian Leo Fall (1873-1925) was a contemporary of operetta great Franz Lehar. Today, Fall is overshadowed by the Hungarian Lehar but in his own time he possessed equal fame and his works were as popular as Lehar's. I have broadcast recordings of Fall's operettas fairly recently: The Rose of Stambul (1916) on Sunday, July 13, 2014 and Madame Pompadour (1922), his last operetta, on Sunday, May 17, 2015. Paroli, also first called Frau Denise (1902) is one of Fall's earliest lyric theater pieces. It's not an operetta per se, but a one act comic opera that premiered at acabaret theater in Berlin. The story of Paroli has some of the elements of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro," only here the philandering count (or marquis) is stymied by being locked up in a tower. Paroli was recorded in the Philharmonie hall in Cologne in March of 2012 under the auspices of West German Radio Cologne. Axle Kober directed the broadcast house orchestra and chorus of the West German Radio Cologne. The German CPO label released Paroli on a single compact disc in 2015.

 

Antonio Salieri (1752-1825) was a junior colleague of the great reformer of eighteenth-century opera Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787). No one is certain to this day how great a hand Gluck actually had in the composition of the French lyric tragedy Les Danaides, but it seems he graciously allowed Salieri to take credit by name for Les Danaides when it successfully premiered in Paris in 1784. Salieri's tragic opera is certainly in the austerely classical style of Gluck. In times past I have presented recordings of two other operas that are entirely the work of Salieri: the highly successful opera buffa La Locandiera ("The Mistress of the Inn," 1773) on Sunday, January 31, 1999, and another opera buffa, Falstaff (1799) on three occasions in 1994, 1996 and 2014. In all, Salieri composed at least 40 operas during his long career - many more than his supposed rival, Mozart. This particular one, "The Danaids", dramatizes a legend about mass murder in ancient Greece. The French conductor and baroque specialist Christophe Rousset has given us fine recorded interpretations of operas by Lully and the like. He does his best in classical mode with the Salieri opera. Rousset leads the period instrument ensemble he founded, Les Talens Lyriques and the choral singers of the Centre of Baroque Music of Versailles. Recorded in 2013, Les Danaideswas released in a deluxe limited edition two CD package through Ediciones Singulares of France.

There's time remaining this afternoon for another French opera of the classical period - a comic opera that sounds like the work of the young Mozart. When he visited Paris with his mother in 1778 Mozart may well have taken in a performance of Philidor's Les Femmes Vengees("The Avenged Women," 1775). This one hour-long, one act opera comique was so popular and entertaining it held the stage for years after its premiere. Its' plot resembles that of Mozart's later comic masterpiece Cosi fan Tutte (1790). Francoise-Andre DanicanPhilidor (1726-1795) was an acknowledged chess grandmaster as well as composer. He practically invented the sub genre of opera comique. What is presumably the world premiere recording of Les Femmes Vengeeswas released in 2015 on a single Naxos compact disc. Ryan Brown directed the singers and period instrument players of Opera Lafayette, an American musical outfit dedicated to the revival of neglected French repertoire. They staged "The Avenged Women" in 2014 in musically complete form. Philidor's piece was incorporated into their production ofCosi as if it was the third to concluding act of the Mozart opera.

 

I will call this my special Stonewall Sunday broadcast, since the date falls right around the time of the weekend in June, 1969 when the Stonewall gay riot took place in New York City's Greenwich village gay ghetto- a historic event that gave birth to the gay liberation movement in the United States, with so much gay history to follow. Rufus Wainwright (b. 1971), the openly gay son of folksinger/songwriter Loudon Wainwright, had already made a name for himself as a rock vocalist and songwriter before he turned to writing opera. He had been crazy about opera, it seems, since the age of fourteen. (Indeed, it's been said many gay men are opera lovers.) Prima Donna (2009) is Wainwright's personal, loving contribution to the genre. Wainwright wrote the libretto himself in French language with Bernadette Colomine. He also composed and orchestrated the entire score himself. Prima Donna sets forth the story of a legendary French soprano, Madame Regine Saint Laurent, a former opera superstar, now retired, who would like to return to the stage. But her glorious voice has failed her. Prima Donna is suffused with nostalgia for a bygone Golden Age of opera singing. Wainwright wrote this his first opera on commission from the Manchester International Festival- Sadler's Wells, Luminato and the arts festivals of Toronto and Melbourne. It was first staged at the Palace Theatre, Manchester in the UK, then went on to London, Toronto and New York City. Prima Donna was recorded in BBC studios in 2015. Jayce Ogren conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Soprano Janis Kelly stars as Madame St. Laurent. Rufus Wainwright dedicated the world premiere recording of Prima Donna to his husband Jorn Weisbrodt. It was issued on two Deutsche Grammophon compact discs.

     Those DGG discs I obtained on loan for broadcast fromRon Meehan, former classics deejay here at WWUH and a specialist collector of recordings of "alternative" classical music of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Rob Meehan is also the founder of WWUH's "Gay Spirit" gay radio program. I have contributed recordings of my own for broadcast during this two-month period of programming. From my own collection of opera on CD come Elgar's King Olaf and the St. George cantata, Lully's Phaeton, Mozart's Il Re Pastore and Les Mysteres d'Isis, Fall's Paroli and the Sousa operetta. The Pentatone CD's of Die Meistersinger and the Salieri opera are derived from our station's ever-growing collection of classical music recordings. Thanks as always must go to WWUH's operations director Kevin O'Toole for mentoring me in the preparation of these notes for cyber-publication. Additional thanks to Monica.

 

In Central CT and the Springfield, MA area you can hear us on 91.3 FM.

In Somers, CT tune to 89.7 FM.

In Wallingford, we're on 89.9 FM.

And in the Greater Torrington area WAPJ, 89.9 and 105.1 carries many of our programs.