A Brief Rant: The Metropolitan Opera Quizzes Have To Go

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I’ll start by admitting that I rarely tune in for the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.  When I do, it’s usually because I’m in the car and when I turn the ignition, the radio comes on, and it is almost always tuned to the station that employs me.  So I’ll listen for as long as it takes to get where I’m going.  It’s even rarer that I listen to an entire production from start to finish, and in those cases it’s usually when I’ve had to step in to run the board due to the … Continue Reading

Classical Radio in the Jungle

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Warning: Minor spoilers below.  I sat through a good portion of the Golden Globe Awards ceremony last night.  Usually I hate watching awards shows, and for the most part, was bored to tears by this one as well.  But as a lover of classical music, it was delightful to to see Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle take home two awards:  Best Actor in a TV Series (musical  or comedy) for Gael García Bernal’s beautiful portrayal of man-boy conductor Gustavo Dudamel Rodrigo de Souza, and Best TV Series (musical or comedy).  As Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette … Continue Reading

Classical Music Rising: Does It Go Far Enough?

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A new year, and some new things happening in the classical music radio world.  Probably no news is bigger than SRG’s (Station Resource Group) announcement of a new task force to address the concerns that classical music broadcasters face going into the future.  This message appeared in my email inbox just yesterday: We are delighted to start the New Year with news that The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $400,000 to support SRG’s Classical Music Rising, a collaborative project to shape the future of classical music radio. Five founding stations have committed … Continue Reading

Chamber Music Aversion – What Gives?

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We often say that radio is one of the most intimate of all media.  Classical radio, in particular, fits the bill: when I’m on the air, I don’t like to imagine that I’m speaking to hundreds or thousands of people at any given moment, but rather just a small group of people who are sharing in the listening experience. Intimacy (in the strictly platonic sense) has been an important part of music for centuries.  If you look at the majority of works written by the great composers, it’s chamber music.  Think about … Continue Reading

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