Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
Operetta Two
Exploring Music is an adventure — an expedition through the world of classical music. We pick a theme each week and follow the music wherever it leads us. Over the years we’ve explored Shakespeare and music, have followed the lives of many composers (a sort of five-part mini-series), and visited the music of various locales — Paris, Venice, Spain, Hungary, the Pacific Rim. Each five-episode program is a musical journey that focuses on a particular, genre, music festival, or classical theme. It’s a sort of Outward Bound for music, with Bill McGlaughlin as our guide to make sure we all get home safe and sound.
Listeners' emailed suggestions have played a very important role in choosing themes. We’ve recorded over two hundred adventures, and the ideas keep turning up. We don’t think we’ll exhaust the possibilities. Exploring Music is familiar and welcoming, and is where you feel at home on your first visit and can’t wait to get back to sample what the series has come up with for its next five-episodes.
The player below features a continuous five hour loop of the most recent Exploring Music episode. Listen to the past two weeks of Exploring Music here.
Operetta Two
Tune in for the latest installment in a series devoted to exploring Operettas. Bill guides us through The Merry Widow of Franz Lehár, unpacks the mystery of zarzuela, plays some Victor Herbert, and shares with us some delightful pieces from Gilbert and Sullivan, and Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Jerome Kern (phew!) And from John Philip Sousa. Yes, you read that ...
Voices from the East
With mechanical consistency, a lone bell creates a meditative sound. Very slowly, strings begin shimmering through the image by playing canonic scales. This Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, written by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, will be the first piece we hear in this week’s program Voices from the East. Throughout the week, our musical journey brings us to composers ...
Operetta One
In all the years exploring music together, we’ve covered Wagner’s massive Ring Cycle, sampled some big Verdi operas, and heard waltzes from Johann Strauss and Franz Lehár, but we’ve never explored the world of operetta. We know that not everyone can agree on what makes one piece an operetta and another one an opera, or a Singspiel, or a musical, ...
