We begin this week with some arias by Giuseppe Verdi in recordings both new and more than a century old.From 19th century Italy, we go to 20th century…

Hector Berlioz said he wanted contrasts in his Great Mass for the Dead, and he got them, musically at least, with a massive orchestra capable of the…

We begin this week's program with music from the Ukrainian Romantic composer, Mykola Lysenko, combining national themes with forms borrowed from J.S.…

Leonard Bernstein’s Mass was a spectacular work commissioned for the gala opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC…

Leonard Bernstein burst upon the scene at the age of twenty-five as an emergency fill-in conductor for a New York Philharmonic performance. He would…

At one point in the 1940s, Leonard Bernstein became convinced that the future of American music was in the theater: that opera -- especially light opera…

There's a great celebration in the musical world this month. August 25th is the hundred-year anniversary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein, a unique…

Jean Sibelius was Finland's hero-composer. They even put his picture on the currency. But after a seventh symphony in 1924, he called it quits, producing…

There's nothing quite like Florida in July, is there? Certainly William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is nothing like Florida in July, and…

With the coming of World War I, the Russian Empire was on its last legs. Jean Sibelius would turn his musical attention to matters other than Finnish…