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We’re going to throw caution — not to mention taste — to the winds this week as we spend an hour (it seems longer than that) with PDQ Bach and friends (both of them) on this Sunday’s program.

I recently came across an interview I did on WFIT 10yrs ago with former US Congressman, Co-founder of the band ORLEANS, and my friend, John Hall. We discussed the No-Nukes concerts, and the tragedy at Fukushima that had happened just weeks before in Japan.

2022 was Very Cool and Good

The Eroica was the first of the so-called Great Symphonies of Beethoven. Now, two centuries later, it remains impressive, and we’ll hear it as this week’s featured work.

We’re going to spend some time in the Italian Renaissance this week, with music from Venice, Bologna, Milan, and Mantua. Then we’ll move up a few years for some music by some composers who applied for a job with the court orchestra of Dresden.

This Sunday’s program will be the 500th Mozart’s Attic, an opportunity to look back at some of the music that you listeners have said you liked over the nearly-ten-years of this endeavor. Some of the choices might be as expected, but there have been a couple of surprises too.

As a protégé of Brahms, Antonin Dvorak had a noteworthy resume in Europe when he was tapped to run a philanthropic conservatory in New York in 1892. What Dvorak heard in the New World represented a wholly new direction for American composers, and gave us a couple of timeless masterpieces to boot.

We’re going to hear everybody’s favorite battle piece, the 1812 Overture, this Sunday, but then we’re going to follow it with another musical account of battle: Sergei Prokofiev’s movie score for Sergei Eisenstein’s epic film, Alexander Nevsky.

In his 31 years, Franz Schubert managed to write some 1500 pieces of music, which tends to indicate that he must have gotten an early start. We’ll look at some music from Schubert’s salad days on this Sunday’s program.

There’s no great musical tradition surrounding Thanksgiving; the best we can do is to gather some of the music that was being heard around England and Holland around 1620. So that’s what we’ll do: a concert of "Tunes the Pilgrims Left Behind" on this week’s program.