Michael Kownacky
Program HostMichael is program host and host of the WWFM Sunday Opera, Sundays at 3 pm, and co-host of The Dress Circle, Sundays at 7 pm.
You can also hear Michael, along with his The Dress Circle co-host, on JazzOn2, every Wednesday evening from 7pm, eastern, for Strike Up the Band, a program celebrating the big bands and dance bands of jazz.
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This is a program of songs from musicals written by women for Women's History Month.
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This week's Sunday Opera feature Thomas' adaptation of Shakespeare's masterwork, but this one has a moderately happy ending. The opera features Thomas Hampson, June Anderson, and Samuel Ramey. After the opera, we'll hear Thomas' String Quartet No. 1 in E.
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This week's program features a variety of songs by and about the Irish beginning in 1906 and running through the 20th and into the 21st century. The "Irish" musicals we'll be featuring are "Juno," "Irene," "Donnybrook," "Finian's Rainbow," and "Eileen."
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This week's wonderful comedy from Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari is based on a play by Italian genius Carlo Goldoni and comes to us from a live 2007 recording made at La Fenice in Venice.
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We've combined a bit of silliness with calendar art for this week's program as we scheduled fifteen marches from a variety of sources (Broadway, Hollywood, television) to celebrate the month of March - even though none of the marches really have anything to do with the month.
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Hans Pfitzner is all but forgotten in the United States, but his operas are still performed in Europe, and you've already heard one of his works on the Sunday Opera during Christmases past - "Das Christ-Elflein." This week, we're looking at his most successful opera, "Palestrina" which is loosely based on the life and musical importance of the 16th century Italian composer who ensured the use of polyphonic music in the Catholic church.
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We're looking at fourteen songs from shows that opened in New York in March that span 112 years of musical theatre history from "The Pink Lady" to the revival of "Sweeney Todd."
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This week's opera is one of the finest representatives of French Baroque, Charpentier's "Medee" with a stellar cast headed by Lorraine Hunt and Mark Padmore. The recording is from 1994 & 1995.
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This program is looking at four cast recordings that we purchased over the past 30 years or so and put away for "safe keeping." They recently surfaced when we cleaned (a little), and we thought we'd share them with you while we still knew where they were.
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This week's program is about two tricksters. The first is from Haydn's forgotten 1777 comedy "The World on the Moon," and the second is the ballet by Sibelius about Scaramouche which has a tragic ending.