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We’ll hear some concert music with roots in the peoples’ tunes of the United Kingdom as adapted by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Benjamin Britten, and Percy Grainger this Sunday — and just to keep them honest, we’ll hear some of the Real McCoy too.

American music didn’t get much respect in the Old World in the19th century. This would all change later on with the coming of the Jazz Age, but in the meantime there were a few composers who didn’t fit the traditional mold. We’ll look at two of them on this Sunday’s program.

The Silk Road was a network of trade routes spanning the Eurasian land mass and in use for more than 2,000 years, cross-fertilizing cultures from Europe to the Orient and most everything in-between. We’ll touch on just a fraction of the music from the Silk Road on this week’s program.

This week we’re going to look at some of George Friedrich Handel’s “other” music. He was, after all, the most important composer working in Great Britain in the 18th century — no one-hit wonder he -- so let’s stop for a bit and listen to some "Handel Besides The Messiah."

For a variety of reasons, European classical music developed quite differently south of the Pyrenees. We'll hear a sampling with a quick look at what went into the Iberian melting pot, and what sorts of music the blending of Spanish, Moorish, Sephardic, and maybe even Native American cultures produced.

We sometimes regard J.S. Bach as the quintessential conservative church musician, and it's true, that was his day job. But he was no stick-in-the-mud, and we'll look at some of his lighter music as we celebrate his 339th birthday this Sunday.

We're going to hear some French music "of a certain age" this week, we'll skip to another age and place for an hour of J.S. Bach, and then some music by American Paul Creston, and soon-to-become-American Kurt Weill.

We begin a series this Sunday of the fifteen symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich in the context of the times in which they were written. Our story begins with the Symphony #1, a student piece from his conservatory days and this week's featured work.

We come to No.7 in our series of the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich, written largely while the city was under siege. Shostakovich had been labeled an "Enemy of the People" not long before; now he was a "Hero of the Soviet Union."

After decades of working under the Soviet thumb, Dmitri Shostakovich finally vented his own frustration and rage in his 13th Symphony, a musical setting of the already suppressed poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko.