SPRING IS ON THE AIR

posted by James Reel

Our library database holds 171 items associated with the keyword "spring." Of course, some of those are duplicates of popular pieces like Strauss' Voices of Spring and Schumann's "Spring" Symphony, but even so, spring has inspired composers more than any other season. With Wednesday, March 20 bringing with it the new season, we'll devote most of the day on Classical 90.5 to springtime music, beginning appropriately enough with The First Day of Spring by Leroy Anderson, and continuing with seasonal contributions by the likes of Delius, Sibelius, Rachmaninov, Copland, Piazzolla, Grieg, Haydn, Verdi, Respighi, Stravinsky, Vivaldi, and many, many other composers. So many, in fact, that we have an overflow of spring music, and we'll be devoting the first three hours or so of our Thursday schedule to vernal music as well. You can find the complete Wednesday schedule here--scroll down past the KUAZ program grid for the classical music listings--and the Thursday schedule here.

One reason we have "leftover" spring pieces is that on Wednesday we're also dropping into the schedule several short items to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ernesto Nazareth, a composer of many breezy piano pieces in various Latin American styles; think of him as the Brazilian Scott Joplin, and you'll have an idea of what his music is like--not at all ragtime, but piano miniatures in the popular dance styles of the composer's time and place.

By the way, in case you're wondering, we have 145 "summer" pieces in the music library, 66 "autumn" items, and 90 "winter" pieces. If it weren't for all those multiple recordings of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," we'd have far fewer entries under each category.