Upcoming and Noteworthy

Seven of the shows opening through the rest of this Broadway season are musicals - some old, some new. This week on In a Broadway Minute, Theater Critic Howard Shapiro will preview the upcoming musicals Friday (2/22 at 8 am) and Saturday (2/23 at 10 am).

And the winner is… us!  The Academy Awards are always an excellent excuse to cast a nostalgic look back on Oscar history.  We’ll sample from all five of this year’s nominees for Best Original Score, but also revel in music from some of the most honored and beloved classics of all time.  Whether or not the movies’ best days are behind them, we’ll find plenty to celebrate with THREE HOURS OF QUALITY FILM MUSIC, on a special expanded edition of “Picture Perfect” – this Friday only from 4 to 7 pm.

You think that you have relationship issues?  Well, we’re going to be looking at some complicated connections on this week’s Sunday opera (2/24 3:00 p.m.), and then, we’ll have a bit of careless abandon!  We’ll begin with Laurent Petitgirard’s operatic version of “Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man.”  With a book based loosely on the play by Bernard Pomerance by Eric Nonn, the story centers on the life of an extremely deformed man who craves kind human interaction and to live like a “normal man.”  The cast includes Nathalie Stutzmann, Nicolas Rivenq, Robert Breault, and Marie Devellereau with the French Opera Chorus and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo with the composer conducting.  

We’re celebrating black history month on this week’s Dress Circle (2/24 7:00 p.m.) by looking at shows featuring black casts like “Simply Heavenly,” a musical with a book and lyrics by Langston Hughes based on his novel “Simple Takes a Wife” and other “Simple” stories, “Purlie,” a musical based on Ossie Davis’ play “Purlie Victorious,” and “Raisin” based on Lorraine Hansberry’s “Raisin in the Sun.”  

CBS Records’ landmark Black Composers Series has finally come to compact disc.  Made under the direction of conductor Paul Freeman and employing world class orchestras and soloists, these recordings originally appeared on vinyl between 1974 and 1978.  Sony Classical has reissued these invaluable documents as a boxed set.  To coincide with Black History Month, we’re listening to highlights from the 10-CD collection, Sundays in February at 10 pm.  This week, we conclude our survey with music by William Grant Still (pictured), Ulysses Kay, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

“Hamlet” with a happy ending?  Well, sort of… and we’ll hear it on this week’s Sunday Opera (2/17 3:00 p.m.) with Ambroise Thomas’ 1868 operatic version of Shakespeare’s play.  The libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carre, authors of numerous adaptations and opera texts, had the arduous task of shaving down the massive play to mixed reviews – where some critics believe their final product is a concise representation of Shakespeare, others feel that the lack of secondary characters like the gravediggers and the “smoothing” of Shakespeare’s coarse language lessens its impact.

Join The Classical Network as we share our love of music with you in celebration of Valentine's Day - and we hope you will return our affection by becoming a member. We'll bring you music of love and romance all day Wednesday and Thursday. Enjoy the classics that make you swoon! And please take this time to show us how much you appreciate the music we bring you every day of the year by becoming a member, renewing your membership or making an additional gift to the station.