Search results for

This week’s Dress Circle (6/8 7:00 p.m.) is a return to one of our favorite topics, “Involuntary Musical Imagery” otherwise known as stuck song syndrome, sticky music, and cognitive itch, or, as the Germans call them, orhwurm. Of course, their earworms. Those pesky songs that you love to hate. You hear them, and they stay with you for a very long time afterwards.

We’re going where the “neon lights are bright” and “there’s magic in the air” on this week’s Dress Circle (6/29 7:00 p.m.) as we look at songs about Broadway from stage and screen. Even though a great deal of music has been written about being on the stage and theatres, we decided to limit it to only those songs that expressly mention “Broadway” in their titles.

We’re celebrating the career of composer/lyricist William Finn, whom we lost in April, on this week’s Dress Circle (6/22 7:00 p.m.) with thirteen songs from a variety of his often autobiographical musicals.

If you hadn’t noticed, July just happened recently. To welcome it on this week’s Dress Circle (7/6 7:00 p.m.), we’re looking at some of the musicals that have opened in New York this month. We don’t have an exhaustive list, but we were still able to amass a baker’s dozen of songs that span 157 years of musical history.

It’s an afternoon of some “interesting” relationships on this week’s Sunday Opera (6/1 3:00 p.m.) with Ivar Hallstrom’s “Duke Magnus and the Mermaid” and Louis Spohr’s treatment of “Beauty and the Beast” (“Azore et Zamire”).

We’re turning to another opera that’s been forgotten although it was quite popular when it premiered in 1920 on this week’s Sunday Opera (6/15 3:00 p.m.), and as a bonus, it’s written in the Basque idiom. It’s Spanish composer Jesus Guridi’s “Amaya.” Guridi (1886 – 1961) played an important role as a Spanish / Basque composer who wrote operas and zarzuelas as well as orchestral, piano, choral, and organ works.

Happy June! For Broadway openings, it’s not so happy, but we’ve still got a program of songs from a few of the shows that opened in New York in June on this week’s Dress Circle (6/1 7:00 p.m.).

Victor Hugo’s novel “Angelo, the Tyrant of Padua” has been used for several operatic adaptations with Amilcare Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda” probably being the best known, but on this week’s Sunday Opera (6/8 3:00 p.m.), we’re looking at a different treatment by librettist Angelo Zanardini in Alfredo Catalani’s “Dejanice” which had its premiere in 1883.

We’re returning to La Scala for this week’s Sunday Opera (7/6 3:00 p.m.) and Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.” The libretto, based on a verse-novel by Alexander Pushkin about a jaded, cynical, and selfish Onegin whose actions disrupt the lives of just about everyone around him.

It’s a comic battle of the sexes on this week’s Sunday Opera (6/21 3:00 p.m.) with a bit of fiancée swapping from the minds of Lorenzo Da Ponte and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s production of Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte, ossia la scuola degli amanti” which translates with some care to “Women Are Like That or The School for Lovers”