The scholarly voice of "Adventures in Good Music" has died. Here's his obituary. I think this leaves KUSC's Jim Schweda as the reigning musicologist for the masses, unless any others come to mind. I like both, as well as those who hold forth during intermissions of Met broadcasts.

I loved Karl Haas, even though the local classical station, KUSC, stopped running him years ago. Very dry sense of humor, and a wide taste in music.

I love Jim Sveda too, despite his psychotic hatred of Herbert von Karajan. He once did a Record Shelf devoted to gay composers.

Once Svedja did a show on "pop crossovers" into opera, entitled "Yes, But Can They Sing?" or something like that. I heard it last Labor Day Weekend. He was devastating in his criticism of these tyros, whose names I don't even know. I loved every minute of it!

Luckily the terrific classical music station up in Baltimore WBJC still carries "Adventures in Good Music". I can only pick up the station in my car, so it's when I'm out running errands on Saturday a.m. Learned a ton from his programs.

btw -- WBCJ is so much better than the god-awful commercial station in DC -- WGMS, where it's all Mozart, the three Bs, "Poet & Peasant Overture" "Pictures at an Exhibition" etc. all the time. Snooze.

btw 2 -- WETA -- our other fine source for classical music around here (and they do play stuff written after 1900) -- is debating getting out of the music business altogether and concentrating totally on news.


I love Jim Allen despite his psychotic hatred of Der Rosenkavalier!

If you can listen via streaming audio thru your computer, check out XLNC, which is a great classical station out of Tijuana. One neat thing about this station, in addition to its bilingual announcements - and they are FEW with nada advertismos! - is that they don't identify the name and performer of every selection, which makes for a really great way to test and improve your knowledge of classical music. :cool:

But everything comes with a price, and they are doing their fundraising now, so be prepared for more talk than usual. frown

[QUOTE]Originally posted by DCBucky:
[QB] Luckily the terrific classical music station up in Baltimore WBJC still carries "Adventures in Good Music". I can only pick up the station in my car, so it's when I'm out running errands on Saturday a.m. Learned a ton from his programs.

btw -- WBCJ is so much better than the god-awful commercial station in DC -- WGMS, where it's all Mozart, the three Bs, "Poet & Peasant Overture" "Pictures at an Exhibition" etc. all the time. Snooze.


Interesting. Here in LA, the commercial classical music station, KMZT, plays the Mozart, three Bs, and Smetana (are there that many people who want to listen to "The Moldau?") while the public KUSC, as noted by Jim Allen, provides us Jim Sveda, as well as a wider array of music. I've gotten lots of cds from them as "gifts" for becoming a member & renewing said membership.

~Adam

You can pick up WBJC on a nothing-special car radio as far south as Culpeper, which is halfway between DC and Charlottesville. It comes in much more clearly than WETA. WETA has a tower near the Arlington Hospital, but I don't know whether that's the TV antenna or the FM antenna or both. I can look it up.

As for WGMS, it wasn't always that way. The name "Karl Haas" sounds familiar. His shows used to be on WGMS, IIRC.

When I lived in Charlottesville, the old Jefferson Cable, which I suppose is now part of Adelphia, brought in Chicago's commercial classical station WFMT. If you plugged in the cable to your FM tuner's or receiver's antenna terminals, you could hear them. It was a real hoot hearing commercials for the high-end car dealers in the Chicago suburbs - Rolls-Royce of Evanston, or whatever.

Undershowing?

Hell yeah, it was made to be showin!

Hahahaha! No, my intense dislike for Der Rosenkavalier is correct. I once sat down with a friend and we listened to the classic Karajan recording of it with Schwartzkopf etc. and we noted what we thought was good music. Out of a 3:20 opera, we came up with about 75 minutes of good music (the overture, the opening Marschillan/Octavian scene, the "stopping of the clocks" scene (heartbreaking), the Presentation of the Rose scene, the glorious Trio). The third act until the Marschillan arrives is horrid, sub-Vienniese operetta. Yuck! Strauss wrote three of my favorite operas (Salome, Elektra, Die Frau Ohne Schatten) but, man, I could die a contented man if I never hear Rosenkavalier again. And Ariadne too!

IMHO, natch.

Re: classical music radio. KUSC that Adam mentions above has a Saturday show called Modern Masterpieces. I'm about to fire off a not-so-nice letter to KUSC because playing Nielsen symphonies (which I love) in a show called Modern Masterpieces is by no accepted definition of the word in classical music "modern". They pick the safest, least offensive stuff they can find that's written after WWI--WW2 should be the earliest they go back, really--where is the really interesting stuff that's not even serialist plink-plonk music? For example, they played Rautavaara's 8th symphony and it's tough, uncompromising music that's still lush and beautiful, it *can* be done.

his show was my first real intro to classical music

that's such a shame