Week of March 6, 2023 - Millennium of Women’s Music Exploring Music embraces works written in honor of, and by, women. Bill will feature women performers and composers going back as far as we can find them in the history books. Benedictine abbess-composer Hildegard of Bingen; Mozart’s friend, the Spanish composer Maria Theresa von Paradis; a couple of remarkable Polish composers around the time of Chopin; and on to the present day with Shulamit Ran. Performers will include Teresa Carreño and Hilary Hahn, and we hope to squeeze in Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing "Bist du bei mir" by JS Bach. This aria was found copied by a foreign hand in Anna Magdalena Bach’s notebook, and has a theme of secret love.
Week of March 13, 2023- The Proud Tower, Part I Music from the Gilded Age to the Great War. Bill gains his inspiration for these two weeks of Exploring Music from Barbara Tuchman’s book The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914. This was a gilded age for music that brought us boldly into the 20th century. We will listen to music from many composers and their countries—Elgar from Britain, Schoenberg from Austria, and Bill closes this first week with French composer Claude Debussy’s La Mer.
Week of March 20, 2023 - The Proud Tower, Part II More music from the Gilded Age to the Great War. Bill picks up his exploration of music from the “banquet years” in the early 1900s in Russia with music from Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov. We then travel to Paris to hear Cécile Chaminade and conclude in Austria with Mahler and Lehár. Our journey ends with The Rite of Spring, and as we approach the precipice of war, we hear songs from George Butterworth, who died in the Battle of the Somme.
Week of March 27, 2023 - A Visit with Arnold Steinhardt Exploring Music spent a couple of marvelous days with one of the world’s violin giants, Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist for 45 years of the Guarneri Quartet. This week will feature Arnold talking about his youth in Los Angeles, his time with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, his studies with Josef Szigeti, and his time with the Guarneri Quartet. Arnold was keen that we listen to some of the great musicians who'd inspired him along the way — a who's who of remarkable figures —Kreisler, Elman, Heifetz, on and on. Arnold is not only a towering musician — yeah, he stands six feet three, but I'm talking about fiddle playing — he is also beloved among his colleagues for his generosity, intelligence, and kindness.