... and this is Performance Todaay."
(That's my feeble word attempt to capture his tag line.)
Fred Child has a delish radio voice - very melodius! I love the show, and my teaching schedule allows me to listen to Performance Today in full on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays.
Wednesdays are especially great because of the puzzler, the Piano Puzzler. I've already praised it on this blog, but I'm not sure if I've ever provided a link to the Piano Puzzler podcast before. It's so much fun ... and last week, I could have been a winner. (The week before, a loser.)
Today's Performance Today was even special by my Wednesday standard - I was blown away by Hilary Hahn playing a (the??) Sibelius violin concerto. Gorgeous, gorgeous work, and my praise to the sound engineers. Her sound was clear and strong, as though the microphone was inside her instrument. On the show's page, there is a listen button.
I found a clip of the first movement of the concerto at a concert last year - Hahn looks 16! (But really, she's like 28 years old.) The sound is not good on youtube, but still, it's something.
To think that I used to wait for a song I liked on the radio with a blank tape in the cassette recorder at the ready. If I heard the song, I pressed record as fast as I could. Many of my mix tapes, as a result, had the voices of St. Cloud DJs at the beginnings or ends of songs. That said, I'm kind of glad I didn't have all this available to me then ... I might have spent less time making magazine collages and reading Agatha Christie mysteries in my teenage years!
4 comments:
You are so sophisticated ... I wouldn't know a violin from a flute, except that Oliver has a toy that teaches us to tell them apart ...
Those children's classical music toys are something else!!
That's why I like Performance Today - it's for the fan, the listener with just a little knowledge, but it doesn't make listeners feel like big oafs who live in the middle of a windswept prairie with zero culture for 500 miles.
One of my favorite episodes was one with Gabriela Montero that plays improv classical piano. But the puzzler is always a highlight to my Wednesday.
That is so funny about the tape at the ready - I did the same thing and I think about it now and it cracks me up. I had so many tapes with KCLD voices at the beginning. And I would even call in and request a song so I could get it taped! Those were the days.
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