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This week we’re going to devote the entire program to music performed by the Kronos Quartet. There’s nobody else anything like them and there never has been. We’ll scratch the surface this Sunday.

Leonard Bernstein’s Mass was commissioned for the gala opening of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington in 1971. Billed as a theater piece for singers, players, and dancers, it was of a piece with the turbulence of the times. We’ll hear a complete performance this Sunday.

We don’t know why Franz Schubert left his Eighth Symphony unfinished 200 years ago. The reasons are probably quite commonplace, but coupled with the composer’s tragic life story the tale has grown greater than the sum of its parts in the public imagination.

When is a prelude not a prelude? When it doesn’t lead to something else? Apparently not. Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, Scriabin, and other composers wrote heaps of preludes that are actually preludes to nothing. We’ll look at some of these this week in a program of preludes.

In 1913, Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic made the first known recording of a complete symphony (Beethoven’s Fifth, of course). Nikisch was an international star in a time when many conductors relied more on flamboyance than scholarship. Nikisch was different and his musicianship stands out on this old, old recording. See what you think, this Sunday at six.

One of the most talked about bands on the local music scene is Mangrove. We talk with Peyton Derrick, lead singer and songwriter with Mangrove. Mangrove will perform at WFIT’s Sonic Waves Music Festival April, 9 2022.

We have a program of music by English composers this Sunday. Alas we only have three hours, and we’ll have no trouble filling them with music that kept Olde England Merrie over hundreds of years.

Hear my conversation with drummer Harper Millband of Tone Deaf Pedestrians. We’ll discuss the beginnings of the band at The Groove Shack, writing songs and handling fame. They are performing at our Sonic Waves Music Festival on Saturday, April 9 at the Intracoastal Brewing Company.

It’s easy for us to look back to the days of Bach and Handel and close that period off as the end of the Baroque era, and then to focus on the mature Mozart and Haydn — and then Beethoven — as the start of something wholly new. This week we’ll look at some of the music that bridged the ages of these giants: works from the Mannheim School, the Galants, and the other pre-classicists.

In 1623, Heinrich Schutz, working in Dresden during the privations of the Thirty Years War, wrote an oratorio for Easter that was the first known such work by a German composer. Admittedly, it isn’t a terribly cheerful work, but for Schutz these were not terribly cheerful times. And 399 Easters later, we’ll feature it on Mozart’s Attic.