Positively Puzzled

Announcement to Musica Della Sera listeners! Meera Collier-Mitchell and I host Musica della sera, a classical music radio show heard Thursday nights 7-9:30 Pacific on KUSP , Santa Cruz.  I'm pleased to announce that the show now has a regular blog presence on the KUSP Blog Page . Please bookmark the link to the new location: Musica della sera Music Blog .  You'll find a link there to our playlists, as well as posts with information about the music we play, and also music video clips related to the programs. See you there! ─Nicholas Mitchell Nota Bene Comments, requests, suggestions, and feedback are encouraged and appreciated, especially during this launch period.  You can comment on individual blog posts, or tweet me at @puxxled or Meera at @MeeraHyphenated , or "friend" us on Facebook at Nicholas Mitchell and Meera Collier-Mitchell . (With the advent of the Musica della sera blog on KUSP , I will no longer post program notes for ...

(These are program notes for an old show...I'm updating my playlist page to include links, but this one, posted on Facebook, never made it to my blog site.) The show is now up on the Internet to listen to on demand; see below for locating the link. This was my chance to play some of my favorite Christmas music. I'm very pleased with the show, but there are some spectacular technical snafus* in the first ten minutes of the program...listen for them, it's fun! (suspenseful dead air, colliding medieval choirs, oh my! not to mention the host's tryptophanically torpid tongue...I had just come from Christmas dinner at my folks' house.) ATTN: friends of Giselle Wyers, you can hear two of her compositions, "Ave Maria" and "Come, Come, Whoever You Are", about 1 hour and 36 minutes into the stream. Listen to the show while there's still some residual Christmas in the air! You can see what was played by referring to the playlist (originally broadcast...

(These are program notes for an old show...I'm updating my playlist page to include links, but this one, posted on Facebook, never made it to my blog site.) The latest show is now up on the Internet to listen to on demand; see below for locating the link. This show featured sundry compositions by two of Bach's sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Johann Christian. I particularly enjoyed soprano Emma Kirkby's performance of J.C.'s "Salve Regina". Also featured, three Schubert songs, two Mozart violin sonatas, and a Fasch quadro sonata for 2 oboes, bassoon, and basso continuo. Most of the music was unfamiliar to me, gems I happily discovered hiding in the KUSP library. As if Schubert's songs couldn't be sweeter, he wrote lovely obbligato French horn and clarinet parts, respectively, for "Auf dem Strom" (Streamside) and "Der Hirt auf dem Felsen" (Shepherd Abiding on the Rock) . You can see exactly what was played and who performed i...