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This Sunday, November 11, join WHRO-FM for special programming in honor of both Veterans Day and the centenary of Armistice Day, which marked the end of World War I in 1918.
Our Sunday Musical Brunch, from 7 a.m. to noon, will include several special works in remembrance. U.S. Army Corporal John de Lancie was stationed in a Bohemian town in 1946 when he sought out the 80-year-old Richard Strauss. De Lancie knew the composer's music because he had played it: he was the Principal Oboist of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and later the Philadelphia Orchestra. De Lancie convinced Strauss to compose his first and only Oboe Concerto, which will be heard in the second half of the nine o'clock hour. Heard in the second half of the ten o'clock hour is the Orchestral Fantasy of George Butterworth, who served in the British Army during the First World War. The eleven o'clock hour begins with our weekly meeting with Mal Vincent which is immediately followed by a march by John Philip Sousa. The hour will conclude with the music of Maurice Ravel who himself drove an ambulance for the French Army during World War One. Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm when fighting for the Austrian Military, but he pursued his career as a musician, commissioning many composers, most famously Maurice Ravel, to compose works for piano left-hand. Wittgenstein would later flee Europe in 1946 and become an American Citizen, but in 1929, Ravel composed for him the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, which can be heard in the half hour preceding With Heart and Voice.
At noon, With Heart and Voice offers a one-hour program of hymns, readings, and anthems to mark the centenary of Armistice Day.
During Sunday Classics, from 4 to 7pm, Raymond Jones will bring you Cecil Coles’ “Behind the Lines” (Coles was killed fighting in World War I, and several movements of the work were thought to have been destroyed by an artillery shell); George M. Cohan’s “Over There” with Robert Merrill and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 3, “Pastoral,” which is really an elegy based on the composer’s experience volunteering as an ambulance driver in France during WW1; Sir Arnold Bax’s “In Memoriam,” the Brahms “German Requiem,” and the Symphony No.4 by Alberic Magnard, who was killed defending his farm in France during WW1.
From 8 to 10 p.m., Pipedreams will also have a special program of music made in time of war, in reflection on war, and in commemoration of the centenary of the November 11, 1918 Armistice. Raymond Jones returns at 10 p.m. for Evening Classics, featuring Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War” with the Choir of St. John’s College Cambridge and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields under George Guest.
